Profiling School Students' Epistemic Beliefs From Grades 5 to 12

• In Event: Students' Epistemic Cognition

Abstract

Individual’s beliefs about the nature of knowing and learning have been investigated under the label of epistemic beliefs. Although the area of epistemic beliefs is still growing, only a few studies deal with school children. A valuable research approach in this area is classifying students in more homogeneous groups according as it is done in Latent Profil Analyses. Therefore, we investigated 3088 secondary students across grades 5 to 12 with LTAs. We found three distinctive profiles (‘sophisticated’, ‘evidence-based/dynamic’, ‘multiplist’) according to students’ science-related epistemic beliefs. As a justification for this approach, results show several differences between these profiles regarding school and background variables, cognitive outcomes in general and in science as well as science related motivational characteristics.

Authors

• Andrea Bernholt, IPN - Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education

• Nele Nicole Kampa, Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education

• Maria Lindfors, University of Umeå

• Mikael Winberg, University of Umeå