In academic learning, searching for information, and encounters with competing truth claims, individuals engage their epistemic cognition. This chapter provides an introduction to this psychological construct and discusses research about how instructional practice can promote epistemological understanding for the development of an educated…

Background: The "cognitive incongruity model of epistemic beliefs and emotions" states that if students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge (e.g., knowledge as simple and absolute) are incompatible with the epistemic nature of learning materials (e.g., complex and contradictory), cognitive incongruity arises. This, in turn, entails…

Relations between epistemic perspective and online epistemic processing of evidence when reading a text were examined. Thirty-seven young adolescents and 24 graduate university students were asked to read and think aloud with two texts, one in the history domain and the other in the science domain. Participants also completed a prior-knowledge…

This study used think-aloud methodology to investigate 51 Norwegian undergraduates' topic-specific epistemic cognition while working with six documents presenting conflicting views on the issue of cell phones and potential health risks. Results showed that students' epistemic cognition was represented by one dimension concerning the certainty and…

The prominent cognitive theories of probability judgment were primarily developed to explain cognitive biases rather than to account for the cognitive processes in probability judgment. In this article the authors compare 3 major theories of the processes and representations in probability judgment: the representativeness heuristic, implemented as…

A theory of the updating of beliefs over time is presented that explicitly accounts for order-effect phenomena as arising from the interaction of information-processing strategies and task characteristics. The belief-adjustment model is supported by 5 experiments involving 192 adult subjects. (SLD)

Recent research literature in science education, science curriculum documents, and science methods texts have been highly influenced by constructivist views of how students learn science. But the widespread and often uncritical acceptance of constructivism in science education does not reflect the heated debate between constructivists and…

Describes three studies that examined how young children distinguish between the real, physical world and the mental world; between objects and thoughts; and between doing something and imagining it. (HOD)

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…