Examining History Teachers' Epistemological and Pedagogical Beliefs

• In Event: Examining Personal Epistemology in the Teaching and Learning of History

Abstract

Theoretically, epistemological beliefs are described to affect aspects of cognition (Hofer, 2016); and the pedagogical orientations of teachers seem to be connected with student learning (Fives, Lacatena & Gerard, 2015). In a first approach we investigated the relationship between student teachers’ epistemological and pedagogical beliefs in the domain of history.
In research on epistemological beliefs, scholars have often posited developmental scales ranging between “naïve” and “reflective” extremes (Hofer, 2016), while orientations to teaching and learning are often described as ranging between “transmissionist” and “(socio-) constructivist” (Fives, Lacatena & Gerard, 2015). Both kinds of beliefs seem to be affected by context – for instance, teachers’ training courses (Fives, Lacatena & Gerard, 2015; Hofer, 2016). However, the question remains how the positions are interrelated.
In history education, developmental concepts have been used to gauge peoples’ epistemological beliefs (e.g. Maggioni, 2010). In our study we adopted Maggioni’s (2010) framework to construct three epistemological positions: “positivist”, “skeptical” and “narrative constructivist.” Additionally a parallel set of items was constructed to capture teachers’ pedagogical beliefs: “transmission”, “individual constructivist” and “socio-constructivist”. Two questionnaires were developed to investigate these constructs and their relationship to one another. The surveys used in this paper comprise 12 and 13 items respectively. Each position was recorded with 4 to 5 items, which had to be answered on a 4-point Likert-scale (1 = not agree, 4 = totally agree).Data was collected from 186 student teachers from six schools of teacher education, and 12 experienced school teachers in history in German-speaking Switzerland. Background data were also collected. The final sample included 102 females (54.8%). The average age was 28.79 years (SD = 7.79 . At the time of the data collection, they had studied an average of six semester courses of history (M = 6.38, SD = 8.37) and an average of two semester courses of history didactics (M = 2.39, SD = 1.32).
Confirmatory factor analyses yielded valid constructs (e.g. epistemological beliefs: χ2=51.49, df=51, p=.45; CFI=1.00; TFI=1.00; RMSEA=.007; SRMR=.062, WRMR=.62), and the reliabilities were in the acceptable range (e.g. pedagogical beliefs: ω = .79, α = .64-73). Positivist epistemological beliefs were found to be moderately correlated with transmissionist teaching (r = .20), while other correlations did not follow the theoretically expected structure (e.g. skepticism and transmission, r = .27). Structural regression models indicate that epistemological beliefs tend to be affected by the number of completedhistory courses (std. β = .18 to .25). Furthermore, the responses to the “transmissionist position” of the second construct seem to be affected by the number of completed history didactics courses (std. β = .31). The last result is notably not in line with the goals of history teacher training.
Future research should carefully examine the design of training courses for history teachers to understand the reciprocal processes between the epistemological theory underlying history courses in teacher education, beliefs on history teaching and learning, and student teachers’ experiences during school training courses.

Authors

• Martin Nitsche, University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland

• Monika Waldis, University of Teacher Education Northwestern Switzerland