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…

For high school students to develop scientific understanding and reasoning, it is essential that they engage in epistemic cognition and scientific argumentation. In the current study, we used the AIR model (i.e., Aims and values, epistemic Ideals, and Reliable processes) to examine high school students' epistemic cognition and argumentation as…

Epistemic cognition involves the thinking executed as people discern what they know versus what they question, doubt, or disbelieve. Effective or adaptive epistemic cognition underlies the higher-order thinking required for life in the 21st century and has been positively correlated with academic achievement. As such, researchers have designed a…

First-year courses have been used to bolster college student success, but empirical evidence on their efficacy is mixed. We investigated whether a first-year science of learning course, focused on self-regulated learning, would benefit first-generation college students. We randomly assigned students to a treatment condition involving enrollment in…

Epistemic cognition, defined as the ways that people acquire, justify, and use knowledge, has been a prominent area of scholarship in educational psychology for nearly 50 years. Researchers have argued that epistemic cognition is a key predictor of many 21st century learning outcomes including critical thinking, scientific literacy, and historical…

Epistemic cognition is the thinking that people do about what and how they know. Education has long been concerned with promoting reflection on knowledge and processes of knowing, but research into epistemic cognition began really in the past half century, with a tremendous expansion in the past 20 years. This review summarizes the broad range of…

Recently, research on the role of epistemic beliefs in conceptual change has increased dramatically. The focus of that research has largely been on students' beliefs about knowledge and knowing; that is, how one understands what it means to know. In this article, we consider the characteristics of knowledge and knowing (i.e., epistemic frames)…

Users benefit most from computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) when they are adept at self-regulated learning (SRL). Learner characteristics, such as epistemic beliefs, influence SRL processing. Therefore, research into learning with CBLEs must account for interactions between epistemic beliefs and SRL. In this article we integrate epistemic…

Personal epistemology researchers assert that collegiate faculty expect their students to have sophisticated beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing, and are likely to give low grades to students whose work reflects naive beliefs. To test whether these assertions were accurate, 282 college faculty completed an online survey where they…

We propose an integration of aspects of several developmental and systems of beliefs models of personal epistemology. Qualitatively different positions, including realism, dogmatism, skepticism, and rationalism, are characterized according to individuals' beliefs across three dimensions in a model of epistemic and ontological cognition. This model…