The Adaptive Nature of Learners' Epistemic Criteria for Evaluating Scientific Visual Representations

• In Event: 53.029 - Epistemic Education and Learning

Abstract

The aim of this study was to document learners’ epistemic criteria for evaluating visual information sources. Middle-school students (N = 204) evaluated four pairs of scientific visual representations (VRs) and wrote their criteria for evaluating the quality of scientific VRs. Participants’ epistemic criteria were diverse and included representational, communicative, and epistemic aim affordance criteria. Only about half of the participants described representational criteria, related to the epistemic adequacy and reliability of the representation. Most of the criteria described by participants were also applied in the evaluation of the VRs. However, criteria were applied adaptively, in ways that reflected the informational and representational affordances of the VRs and the differences between them. The findings demonstrate the generative nature of epistemic thinking.

Authors

• Sarit Barzilai, University of Haifa

• Billie Eilam, University of Haifa