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Publications (136)
Disagreement is often perceived negatively, yet it can be beneficial for learning and scientific inquiry. However, students tend to avoid engaging in disagreement. Peer critique activities offer a promising way to encourage students to embrace disagreement, which supports learning as students articulate their ideas, making them available for discus...
The nurturing of learners’ ways of knowing is vital for supporting their intellectual growth and their participation in democratic knowledge societies. This paper traces the development of two interrelated theoretical frameworks that describe the nature of learners’ epistemic thinking and performance and how education can support epistemic growth:...
Historic challenges in the biological sciences, such as the spread of disease and climate change, have created an unprecedented need for humans to engage with scientific information to address societal problems. However, understanding these socioscientific issues (SSI) can be hard due to the difficulty of comprehending their complex structures and...
An important goal of science education is promoting scientific literacy—the competence to interact with science as laypeople to solve problems and make decisions in their personal and community lives. This is made more challenging in an age of increasing science denialism. In this article, we discuss how to design learning environments for science...
Introduction
This study reports on a classroom intervention where upper-elementary students and their teacher explored the biological phenomena of eutrophication using the Modeling and Evidence Mapping (MEME) software environment and associated learning activities. The MEME software and activities were designed to help students create and refine vi...
Diagnostic competences of teachers are an essential prerequisite for the individual support of students and, therefore, highly important. There is a substantial amount of research on teachers’ diagnostic competences, mostly operationalized as diagnostic accuracy, and on how diagnostic competences may be influenced by teachers’ professional knowledg...
An important goal of 21st century education is preparing students to comprehend and integrate information from multiple documents to make informed judgments as lay people. This paper describes student use of a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) system called EDDiE (Electronic Documents Disagreements Evaluation) that embeds epistemic s...
Science education needs to be transformed to meet the needs of the current “post- truth” era. One way to face these challenges is for science educators to promote apt epistemic performance in classrooms. In this paper, we use Barzilai & Chinn’s (2018) Apt-AIR framework to analyze teacher instructional moves as they work to encourage apt epistemic p...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a beginning jazz improvisation learning environment for middle school instrumentalists, including whether one of two instructional sequences of harmonic form improvisation tasks better supported four outcomes: achievement, self-assessment, self-efficacy, and motivation. Over 12 weeks...
Developing and applying epistemic ideals or criteria is a core component of epistemic
practices. In history education, epistemic criteria have been included in approaches to teaching history as well as in theoretical frameworks for investigating the learning and understanding of the domain. One justification for these frameworks is in the epistemic...
Many recent approaches to history education—such as those related to historical thinking, historical reasoning, or inquiry-based learning—have brought the practice of historiography (i.e. historical research and writing) to the center of learning about history. Students are to learn about how historical knowledge is constructed, and this is often p...
Comprehending and evaluating scientific evidence is not trivial, especially in the current “post truth” era with its rampant misinformation and fake news. Moreover, evaluating scientific evidence (even simplified evidence presented in the media) entails some disciplinary knowledge of core concepts in the domain and an understanding of the epistemic...
A core aspect of scientific inquiry is developing and revising models. This practice is supported by shared epistemic criteria to evaluate the “goodness” of models (and other epistemic products). A prominent criterion used by scientists is evidential fit. The use of epistemic criteria is gaining traction in science education; however, there is a ga...
The contemporary information world is epistemically complex—rife with conflicts, misinformation, and diverse forms of poor evidence. To prepare learners for this world, educators must enable learners to handle this epistemic complexity. As one important component, this includes preparing learners to handle the various forms of poor evidence that th...
Productive failure is a learning design that encompasses problem solving prior to instruction and the learning that occurs during and after this process. In the mathematics education literature, there is a need for analyses of students’ interactions that occur as they collaborate during the productive failure process. In this paper, we contribute t...
Scientists use epistemic criteria to evaluate products of scientific inquiry, such as models. Engaging students with epistemic considerations as part of scientific practice is a growing focus of science education. Recent research has shown that students are able to identify and describe criteria for good scientific models. However, we know little a...
Background: The modern world is rife with complex challenges that require citizens to weigh multiple, conflicting claims and competing methods for discerning truth from falsehood. Such evaluations depend highly upon prior knowledge. Therefore, the goal of epistemic education is the cultivation of apt epistemic performance: successfully achieving va...
Educators have been increasingly concerned with what can be done about “post-truth” problems—that is, threats to people's abilities to know what is true—such as the spread of misinformation and denial of well-established scientific claims. The articles and commentaries in this special issue present diverse perspectives on how “post-truth” problems...
In the so-called “post-truth” world, there exists widespread confusion and disagreement over what is known, how to know, and who to trust. Current education has largely failed to meet the challenges of this world. Grounded in a new analysis of the goals of epistemic education, we argue for new directions in instruction. Our analysis specifies three...
Events worldwide have heightened concerns that education is failing to prepare students for a “post-truth” world. A core “post-truth” challenge is the prevalence of deep epistemic disagreements: people fundamentally disagree about appropriate ways of knowing. We provide a new analysis of deep epistemic disagreements and propose an educational respo...
Epistemic injustice is a specific type of harm that occurs when people are unfairly treated in their capacity as knower (Fricker, 2007). One harm that may come from epistemic injustice is that people are denied their ability to become full epistemic agents either on their own or as part of a greater knowledge production process. In this paper, we a...
Along their path towards expertise, historians undergo conceptual changes. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to argue that conceptual change in history involves, first, a fundamental shift from an understanding of history as the past to an understanding of history as human production. And second, expert conceptual change involves understandi...
This study explores the role of domain-specific knowledge in students’ modeling practice and how this knowledge interacts with two domain-general modeling strategies: use of evidence and developing a causal mechanism. We analyzed models made by middle school students who had a year of intensive model-based instruction. These models were made to exp...
The development and spread of new media and technologies are creating new challenges and opportunities for education. One of the key challenges, to which education needs to respond, is the wide-ranging impact of new media on people’s capabilities to engage in reliable epistemic processes for achieving epistemic aims. As a result of this impact, par...
New forms of data, data visualisation and human interaction with data are changing radically and rapidly. As a result, what it means to be data literate is also changing. In the big data era, people should not simply be passive recipients of data-based reports. They need to become active data explorers who can plan for, acquire, manage, analyse, an...
Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K‐12 Science Education and the NGSS. However, the construct of evidence remains largely underspecified in these documents, providing insufficient guidance on how to engage students with the broad and complex nature of evidentiary reasoning. This creates...
Competence in scientific reasoning is one of the most valued outcomes of secondary and higher education. However, there is a need for a deeper understanding of and further research into the roles of domain-general and domain-specific knowledge in such reasoning. This book explores the functions and limitations of domain-general conceptions of reaso...
In the introduction chapter, we discuss the motivation for the book on the role of general and specific knowledge in scientific reasoning and argumentation. Furthermore, we will give an initial glimpse into how the individual chapters contribute to the questions regarding the interplay of general and specific knowledge in scientific reasoning and a...
To appear in the International Handbook of the Learning Sciences
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth
report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of...
Recent years have seen a surge in educational efforts to foster the development of learners’ epistemologies. Our first aim is to problematize some current assumptions about the goals of epistemic education and to argue that existing models of lay or expert epistemologies cannot directly translate into educational goals. Our second aim is to present...
This commentary on the special issue, entitled Models and Tools for Systems Learning and Instruction, highlights the accomplishments of the papers in this collection. It also points to some avenues for further strengthening research on promoting systems understanding. Collectively, the papers make advances in our understanding of how to design lear...
In our commentary on this excellent set of articles on Sourcing in the Reading Process, we endeavor to synthesize the findings from the seven articles and discuss future research. We discuss significant contributions related to source memory, source evaluation, use of sources in action and belief, integration of information from multiple sources, a...
Current science education reforms and the new standards (Next Generation Science Standards [NGSS], 2013) advocate that K-12 students gain proficiency in the knowledge-generating practices of scientists. These practices include argumentation, modeling, and coordinating evidence with theories and models. Practice-based instruction is very different f...
Neue Wege für Forschung über das Argumentieren: Einblicke aus dem AIR-Framework for Epistemic Cognition
Zusammenfassung. Dieser Kommentar befasst sich mit den vielen unterschiedlichen und interessanten Artikeln des Themenhefts. Zuerst wird überblicksartig eine Zusammenschau der Befunde mit Blick auf neue Erkenntnisse gegeben. Dabei werden Aspekte v...
Interdisciplinary approaches to identifying, understanding, and remediating people's reliance on inaccurate information that they should know to be wrong.
Our lives revolve around the acquisition of information. Sometimes the information we acquire—from other people, from books, or from the media—is wrong. Studies show that people rely on such misi...
Background
Research in traditional classrooms and laboratories has indicated that autonomy support by teachers is infrequent and focused on the narrow provision of choice. One explanation for the limited autonomy support in classrooms is that typical school resources and tasks limit the availability of experiences that are interesting, relevant, wi...
Preconference Workshop: Epistemic cognition broadly refers to an array of understandings and practices related to knowledge claims and their justification, as well as the practices and processes for achieving knowledge. Epistemic cognition encompasses both explicit beliefs as well as involved reasoning practices. Recent work by learning scientists...
The Next Generation Science Standards and the Framework for Science Education emphasize the importance of engaging learners with the core scientific inquiry practices of modeling and argumentation. Students are also expected to understand the epistemic grounds and norms that accompany these practices. We report on a study in which we engaged middle...
This symposium raises the issue of the role of domain-general factors in scientific reasoning and argumentation tasks. The contributions cover conceptual problems concerning the interplay of general and specific elements in scientific reasoning, methodological requirements and existing research paradigms for investigating the role of cross-domain f...
The conceptualization of students' personal epistemologies has been criticized for being inconsistently defined, overly simplistic, and inappropriately decontextualized. Broadly, epistemic cognition encompasses explicit thoughts about the nature of knowledge as well as reasoning processes related to knowledge claims and justifications. Learning sci...
Inquiry environments in science classes have increasingly incorporated more features of authentic scientific practice. However, relatively few environments have incorporated a critical feature of scientific practice: evaluation of evidence quality. This paper reports results from two studies in middle-school life science classes that investigate se...
Microgenetic methods involve the detailed analysis of processes of learning, reasoning, and problem solving. The goal is not merely to identify factors that influence learning, but to understand how these factors mediate learning, step by step, as learning occurs. In this chapter, we discuss a cluster of methods designed to provide an in-depth, det...
This symposium brings together four research groups that have been working on advancing theoretical models of guidance for CSCL. The models share the emphasis on scripting and orchestration but vary in terms of their specific focus, grain size of collaboration, and the nature of learning activities they address. The goals of this symposium are, fir...
The Framework for Science Education (National Research Council, 2011) and the subsequent Next Generation Science Standards feature modeling as an integral component of inquiry driven classrooms. Evaluating such models entails careful consideration of fit with evidence. In this poster we discuss student use of computer animations, simulations, blogs...
Conceptual change in the domain of evolution requires two simultaneous changes: changes in students' theoretical conceptions (i.e., developing a proper understanding of evolutionary models) and changes in students' epistemic practices (i.e., learning the inquiry practices scientists use to develop, revise, and evaluate explanatory models). Model-ba...
Psychological and educational researchers have developed a flourishing research program on epistemological dimensions of cognition (epistemic cognition). Contemporary philosophers investigate many epistemological topics that are highly relevant to this program but that have not featured in research on epistemic cognition. We argue that integrating...
Epistemic criteria are the standards used to evaluate scientific products (e.g., models, evidence, arguments). In this study, we analyzed epistemic criteria for good models generated by 324 middle-school students. After evaluating a range of scientific models, but before extensive instruction or experience with model-based reasoning practices, stud...
This poster explores the ways in which students participating in a scientific modeling curriculum engaged with a specific scaffold, the 'Model-Evidence Link' (MEL) diagram, designed to reduce cognitive load and facilitate modeling literacy. Completed MEL diagrams, along with the small-group argumentation sessions they supported, represent rich sour...
The purpose of this symposium is to provide a forum for exploring how contemporary developments in philosophy can enrich learning sciences research on epistemic cognition (EC). In three papers, we discuss ways in which research on epistemic cognition can profit greatly from closer attention to the philosophical literature. The first paper reviews a...
Genetics is the cornerstone of modern biology and understanding genetics is a critical aspect of scientific literacy. Research
has shown, however, that many high school graduates lack fundamental understandings in genetics necessary to make informed
decisions or to participate in public debates over emerging technologies in molecular genetics. Curr...
This article presents a commentary on Stellan Ohlsson's (2009) theory of conceptual change by resubsumption and competitive evaluation of cognitive utility. We note two features of Ohlsson's theory that we think are particularly strong. We then argue that Ohlsson's theory explains one route to conceptual change but that there are many other routes...
The construction and evaluation of scientific models, together with the iterative modification of these models in response to evidence, constitute paradigmatic scientific practices. If inquiry instruction is to engage students in authentic scientific reasoning, these practices need to become routine in the science curriculum. This paper reports on...
