Personal Epistemology

The Psychology of Beliefs About Knowledge and Knowing

Barbara K. Hofer, Paul R. Pintrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136608636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of personal epistemology from a psychological and educational perspective. Both theory building and empirical research have grown dramatically in the past decade but, until now, this work has not been pulled together in a single volume. That is the mission of this volume whose state-of-the-art theory and research are likely to define the field for the next 20 years. Key features of this important new book include: * Pioneering Contributors --The book provides current perspectives of each of the major theoreticians and researchers who pioneered this growing field, as well as contributions from new researchers. * Diverse Perspectives --The contributors represent a variety of perspectives, including education, educational psychology, developmental psychology, higher education, and science and mathematics education. * Editorial Integration --Opening and closing chapters by the editors set out key issues confronting the field.

1

Personal Epistemology as a Psychological and Educational Construct: An Introduction

Barbara K. Hofer

Middlebury College

In our most mundane encounters with new information and in our most sophisticated pursuits of knowledge, we are influenced by the beliefs we hold about knowledge and knowing. What has been called personal epistemology, epistemological beliefs or theories, ways of knowing, or epistemic cognition, is activated as we engage in learning and knowing. For example, as we read the morning paper, we may make judgments about the credibility of the claims in a particular article or about the source of information. In our professional lives, we confront the learning of new skills and ideas and make determinations about their value and worth to us. As citizens, we are called on to judge competing claims from officials and politicians, to weigh evidence, and to make decisions about issues of importance to ourselves and our communities. And in the classroom, students regularly encounter new information and may approach the learning process quite differently depending on whether they view knowledge as a set of accumulated facts or an integrated set of constructs, or whether they view themselves as passive receptors or active constructors of knowledge. In each of these situations the adequacy of our epistemological theories will in some way determine what and how we make meaning of the information we encounter. As both the amount and the availability of information increase, and as the tools of access change rapidly, we need a better understanding of personal epistemology and its relation to learning. This book is dedicated to such a pursuit.

As a philosophical enterprise, epistemology is concerned with the origin, nature, limits, methods, and justification of human knowledge. The term “epistemic,” by contrast, relates to knowledge more generally, and to the conditions for acquiring it. From a psychological and educational perspective, the focus of concern among those studying personal epistemology or epistemic cognition is how the individual develops conceptions of knowledge and knowing and utilizes them in developing understanding of the world. This includes beliefs about the definition of knowledge, how knowledge is constructed, how knowledge is evaluated, where knowledge resides, and how knowing occurs.

With a foundation that can be traced both to Piaget’s attention to “genetic epistemology” and to Perry’s original work on the epistemological development of college students, a body of research has developed that addresses issues related to beliefs about knowing and knowledge as experienced by the individual learner. This study of personal epistemology draws on diverse research traditions, paradigms, and disciplines, and has been conducted by educational, developmental, and instructional psychologists, as well as researchers in the areas of higher education, counseling, science and math education, reading and literacy studies, and teacher education. As a result, although both theory building and empirical research in this field have grown dramatically in the past decade, the results have appeared in disparate locations and the work has been labeled under different constructs. This volume is an attempt to address several needs: to bring together the work from differing areas, to provide researchers with an opportunity to communicate their current perspectives on personal epistemology, and to lay the foundation for continuing research by suggesting important questions and directions for future study. Contributors include both pioneering researchers who bring a long- term perspective to ongoing work as well as new researchers in the field.

In the chapters that follow, these researchers address several central issues that concern those working in this area. What is the current perspective on each of the prominent conceptual models of personal epistemology? What other conceptual and theoretical issues need attention? What are the methodological problems that we need to address and how might we best proceed to do so? What do the new disciplinary approaches to understanding epistemology offer? Each of the contributors to this volume was invited to choose to focus on one of these key areas and to conclude with suggestions for future research.

Theoretical Models of Personal Epistemology

A quick sketch of the history of the field suggests that several overlapping lines of study have provided a rich portrait of how epistemological understanding develops. (For a review of the literature, see Hofer & Pintrich, 1997.) When Perry began studying Harvard freshmen in the late 1950s to investigate why students responded in dramatically different ways to the plurality of the college experience, he expected that personality differences might offer a plausible explanation. Perhaps students high in obedience to authority, for example, were those who expected faculty members to deliver “truth” from the lecture pulpit and who were frustrated by classes where they were expected to consider and evaluate multiple perspectives. What his longitudinal study unveiled, however, was a road map to the development of epistemology during late adolescence, as influenced by a liberal arts education. Belief in a dualistic view of knowledge, often characteristic of the first-year college student, was typically challenged and transformed, in an advancement toward an evolving capacity for intellectual commitments in the face of relativism. This trajectory has been widely utilized as a heuristic for interpreting college student development, and Perry’s book, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (Perry, 1970), reissued in paperback in 1998, has become a field guide for college professors striving to interpret the patterned diversity of responses to their instruction. In his chapter on Perry’s work, William Moore reviews and reconsiders the Perry scheme, providing an update on extensions and refinements of the model and addressing the relevance of the scheme today.

Perry’s work was the starting point for several other meticulous, longitudinal, qualitative studies that have furthered enhanced our knowledge of the role that personal epistemology plays in intellectual development. Interested in the experience of women as learners and aware of the absence of women in the theory- building stage of research in prior studies, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule conducted interviews with women from diverse educational settings. Included in their extensive interview protocol were a set of questions based on Perry’s work; ultimately, however, responses to these questions became central to their analysis and interpretation. Their landmark study of “women’s ways of knowing” provided the first portrait of the epistemological perspectives of women and the developmental course of these views, elaborated in a five- position model that parallels and richly extends Perry’s model. Among other contributions, the model offered in Women’s Ways of Knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986) addressed women’s relation to knowledge and knowing, brought the terms “separate knowing” and “connected knowing” into educators’ vocabulary, and heightened awareness of the role of gender in epistemological development. Blythe Clinchy provides a fresh look at the model and these aspects in particular.

In spite of the outcome of their research, neither Perry and his staff nor Belenky, et al. deliberately set out to conduct a study of epistemological development per se, nor were either team interested in exploring gender differences. By contrast, Marcia Baxter Magolda, drawing on Perry’s work, directed her attention explicitly to what she has termed “epistemological reflection” and to the role of gender. Her longitudinal study of students at a small Midwestern liberal arts college suggests gender-related patterns in knowing within her four-point model (Baxter Magolda, 1992). Baxter Magolda has continued to interview the students in her sample, and her chapter offers us the opportunity to view how such development continues into early adulthood.

One of the most comprehensive bodies of work in the study of intellectual development has been the work of Karen Kitchener and Patricia King, whose Reflective Judgment model encompasses both personal epistemology and skills of critical thinking (King & Kitchener, 1994). Kitchener also introduced the construct of epistemic cognition (Kitchener, 1983), a monitoring process that occurs in the solving of ill-structured problems. In their chapter, they explicate the relation between these constructs and review two decades of research on epistemic cognition and their seven-stage model of the development of reflective judgment. This model was empirically derived from individuals’ responses to questions that elicit epistemological assumptions while reasoning about complex, open-ended problems.

A departure from the developmental approach was initiated by Marlene Schommer, who has conceptualized personal epistemology as a system of more- or-less independent beliefs, hypothesized as five distinct dimensions of epistemology that may or may not develop in synchrony (Schommer, 1994). The categorization of “beliefs” also distinguishes this approach from earlier work, as the developmental schemes address personal epistemology as a complex, integrated, structural scheme. Furthermore, Schommer’s contribution has been the introduction of a written instrument for assessing these beliefs, by asking individuals to respond to a set of items, scored on a continuum (Schommer, 1990; Schommer, Crouse, & Rhodes, 1992). Schommer-Aikins describes the evolution of her framework, reflects on the value of this work, and explicates her thinking about several central assumptions of the model.

In providing updated looks at each of the five main models of personal epistemology, we hope that the reader will be able to gain perspective on both their commonalities and their differences, and to engage questions that have concerned those doing research in this field. First and foremost, are these researchers addressing the same construct? Is the difference in labels a reflection of meaningful distinctions that need preserving, or do the similarities in the developmental trajectories of each model suggest an underlying idea that could be represented in a single term? Is it worthwhile or possible to consolidate the theoretical work that has developed in this area? How might we achieve greater conceptual clarity?

Other questions are suggested by how the various models are conceptualized, and particularly by the difference in the developmental models and the work of Schommer and others who have utilized the epistemological beliefs model. Is this a cognitive process or a set of beliefs? How do these distinctions affect what we study and how we study it? Are the dimensions of personal epistemology structurally integrated or potentially independent of one another? Does epistemology encompass beliefs about learning as well as beliefs about knowledge? What work remains to be done in the development of the models?

Conceptual Issues

As the study of personal epistemology has grown, researchers have begun to take a look at both the larger view of development in which this construct is situated as well as some of the more vexing details. Moving beyond the distinct models, other conceptual questions concern researchers in this area. What exactly is it that is developing in these models? How does personal epistemology relate to cognitive development? How does it relate to skills of critical thinking? Does it develop in a linear fashion or is it recursive? What is the process by which beliefs change? How does our psychological understanding of personal epistemology map on to philosophical positions in epistemology? And how might we use such an understanding from philosophical traditions to better inform our own work? These are some of the questions that are currently under discussion and which several contributors to this volume were interested in addressing.

A review of the existing developmental models (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997) suggests that each of the primary models posit developmental trajectories that parallel one another. Regardless of the number of stages, positions, or perspectives, the sequence invariably suggests movement from a dualistic, objectivist view of knowledge to a more subjective, relativistic stance and ultimately to a contextual, constructivist perspective of knowing. In their chapter on epistemological thinking—and why it matters—Deanna Kuhn and Michael Weinstock identify the developmental tasks inherent in the growth of epistemological understanding. They suggest that it is this coordination of the subjective and objective dimensions of knowing that is the essence of epistemological development and describe their research in measuring the progression of this cognitive process from childhood to adulthood. Their work is an attempt to clarify and simplify our understanding of epistemological development and to situate it within our knowledge about cognitive development.

Not only has the trajectory of development appeared to be similar in the models outlined by the early researchers in this area, but the starting point for most of these schemes often appeared to coincide with the first year in college. As a review of the developmental models indicates, most of the early theory building was derived from empirical studies of college students, and rarely were younger individuals assessed for their epistemological awareness. Only recently have researchers begun to explore the epistemological assumptions operative earlier in life, and their findings suggest a progression that resembles the developmental path of older students, pointing perhaps to the recursiveness of this process. Michael Chandler, Darcy Hal- lett, and Bryan Sokol explore the perplexing issue of how to interpret conflicting findings about the timing of various epistemological shifts in thinking. Recent research that investigates the epistemology of younger individuals, as well as research that theoretically bridges epistemology and theory of mind, have lead these authors to examine the competing claims about the sequenced restructuring of beliefs, a premise that is fundamental to any of the models of epistemological development.

But just how does epistemological development occur? What explanatory mechanisms might help us better understand this process? Most developmental theorists presume a Piagetian explanation of equilibration, which posits that a mismatch between the individual’s current beliefs and his or her environment lead to a reconsideration of the beliefs and to either an assimilation of the new ideas into the existing scheme or an accommodation of that scheme. This view has motivated a host of suggestions for the promotion of intellectual and epistemological development in the classroom. Newer work on conceptual change has provided another model for understanding belief change, suggesting that individuals must be dissatisfied with existing conceptions, and find new concepts intelligible, plausible, and fruitful. Furthermore, affective, motivational, and contextual factors play a role in activating the change process (Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle, 1993). Lisa Bendixen addresses the role that epistemic doubt plays in fostering epistemological development and reports on a phenomenological study of this issue. Her model of epistemic belief change offers both a mechanism for how such change is prompted and insight into a developmental process that is consistent with both Piagetian equilibration and conceptual change theory.

How we capture and describe the construct of interest—whether we tag an individual’s epistemology as a set of “beliefs,” for example—has ontological implications, which have often been ignored. We might consider such ideas to reside within the individual as a trait, or we could conceptualize that they are organized into a coherent, invariant developmental sequence that changes only gradually, or we might view epistemological conceptions as contextual and malleable. These diverse views of the construct direct our attention to differing methodological approaches, lead to differing understandings of the construct, and point to differing interventions in the classroom. David Hammer and Andrew Elby address the implications of our ontological views of personal epistemology and provide an alternative framework for consideration. Viewing personal epistemology as a framework of epistemological resources, they envision this as more fine-grained and context-specific than the beliefs and theories suggested in other models. They reject the idea that personal epistemology is relatively stable or traitlike, but hypothesize that it is more likely to be situated in educational contexts. Their chapter also outlines the implications for both instruction and research suggested by the framework they propose.

In the final chapter in this section by Jill Fitzgerald and James Cunningham, we come full circle to the philosophical origins of the field. Having been guided in the previous chapter to investigate ontological assumptions about epistemology, we are now assisted in exploring our own epistemological stances. Theoretical outlooks on knowledge guide our approaches and methodology and yet may be underexamined or ill-defined. Fitzgerald and Cunningham provide an epistemological framework that may be useful both in clarifying personal stances as well as in suggesting a guideline for interpreting the epistemological positions of individuals in our research studies. This framework is structured along a multivariate continuum of seven core epistemological issues, ranging from “Can we have knowledge of a single reality independent of the knower?” to “To what degree is knowledge discovered versus created?” Responses to these questions enable identification of the distinguishing characteristics of an epistemological stance, from empiricism to poststructuralism.

The authors in this section provide provocative challenges to researchers interested in personal epistemology and to the educators interested in interpreting student epistemology. Their guidance may be fruitful in the process of refining our own understanding of the core meaning of epistemology, how we can best model it, and the process by which it develops.

Methodological Concerns in the Study of Personal Epistemology

One of the most difficult aspects of the study of personal epistemology has been how to capture something as elusive as individual conceptions of knowledge and knowing. Perry (1970) approached this inquiry in two steps, and both of his approaches have been continued in some fashion by later researchers. He preselected participants based on their scores on the Checklist of Educational Values, a questionnaire he developed on the basis of personality research. Those selected were then invited at the end of each academic year to interviews that began with the seemingly simple question, “Would you like to say what has stood out for you during the year?” With this open-ended approach and an unwavering faith in the individual’s ability to describe his or her own meaning-making process—especially with the caring support of a skillful interviewer—Perry was able to elicit detailed reports from students, which he and his staff then analyzed for structural similarities.

Items from Perry’s original questionnaire live on in the mos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Editors
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I Conceptual Models of Personal Epistemology
• II Theoretical and Conceptual Issues
• III Methodological Issues in the Study of Personal Epistemology
• IV Perspectives on Discipline-Specific Epistemology
• Conclusion
• Author Index
• Subject Index