At the end of the chapter, they wrote, “Three salient cognitive outcome measures see especially important to us, including moral reasoning, cirtical thinking and argumentation, and identity formation”.
How do epistemological beliefs influence or predict faculty members’ identify formation in their teaching, and therefore predict or influence the way that they assess their students?
Tag: epistemological beliefs
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Schraw, G., Bendixen, L. D., & Dunkle, M. E.
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Barnard, 2007: The Expert Ceiling in Epistemological Beliefs
Paulsen and Wells (1998) stated that, “it seems unlikely that substantial differences in
epistemological beliefs across domains would persist in studies of faculty or other more
advanced experts,” (p. 380).According to Schommer’s work, epistemological beliefs as a whole appear to be more
or less domain general when controlling for a variety of background characteristics including
academic discipline, which indicates a certain degree of association of academic discipline with
epistemological beliefs. When not controlling for academic discipline (as did Paulsen and Wells
(1998)), Jehng et al. (1993) discerned differences in epistemological beliefs of college students,
“who study in the soft fields (i.e. social science and arts/humanities) have a stronger tendency of
believe that knowledge is uncertain, are more reliant on their independent reasoning ability, and
have a stronger feeling that learning is not an orderly process than students in hard fields,” (p.
23). Hofer (2000) found strong disciplinary differences among college students whereas students
in psychology more so viewed personal knowledge as a basis for justification of knowing than
students in science while students in science viewed authority and expertise more as the source
of knowledge than students in psychology.In concluding their study examining the epistemological beliefs of college students across
domains of study, Paulsen and Wells (1998) stated that, “it seems unlikely that substantial
differences in epistemological beliefs across domains would persist in studies of faculty or other
more advanced experts,” (p. 380). This statement of Paulsen and Wells regarding experts implies
the existence of an upper limit or ceiling effect in epistemological beliefs as delimited by
expertise across domains. While Hofer and Pintrich (1997) have noted that, “it is unclear where
the process of epistemological understanding begins” (p. 122), the researcher contends that it is
equally unclear where the process of epistemological understanding ends except perhaps as
associated with the achievement of expertise as an outcome. An examination of differences in
the epistemological beliefs of any group of experts however has yet to be studied, thus the
existence of an expert ceiling effect in these beliefs has not been substantiated either way by any
empirical evidence despite its significance to the study of epistemological understanding and the
development of expertise.As while much literature discusses how novices and experts differ,
there is little research discussing how experts are similar as a whole, where research is restricted
to the study of particular expertise in isolation to one another (e.g. Berliner, 1986 & Sternberg &
Horvath, 1995 in re expert teachers; Lichtenberg, 1997 for counseling psychologists; Rolfe, 1997
for nurse practitioners; Tanaka & Curran, 2001 studying recognition capabilities of bird and dog
experts; Wood, 1999 in re visual expertise of radiologists).P.90
The results of this study lend support to the statement of Paulsen and Wells (1998) that it
is, “unlikely that substantial differences in epistemological beliefs across domains would persist
in studies of faculty or other more advanced experts,” (p. 380). Evidence from this study further
lends support for the hypothesis of an upper limit or ceiling effect in the sophistication of
epistemological beliefs among experts given that the researcher empirically studied the self-
reported epistemological beliefs of faculty members across forty-six academic disciplines
represented. No other study to date has examined the epistemological beliefs of experts across
such a variety of disciplines. The overarching significance of this study is that (1) a ceiling effect
in the epistemological beliefs among experts can be supported and (2) that we can determine an
important characteristic of experts in general as having highly sophisticated and similar
epistemological beliefs.P. 91
An understanding by faculty members as to how they are epistemologically different from their students given evidence supporting an expert ceiling in these beliefs can only improve faculty’s understanding of how their students may best learn. A faculty member knowing for instance that their students’ beliefs about knowledge are generally more naive or less sophisticated in nature permits faculty members to be sensitive to the epistemological development of their students and to scaffold and differentiate appropriately.Possible research question:
To what extent do faculty members understand the difference of epistemological beliefs between theirs and their students?To read list:
- EBI (Schraw, Bendixen, & Dunkle, 2002)
- Schommer (1990): omniscient
authority; simple knowledge; certain knowledge; fixed (innate) ability; and quick learning. - Paulsen and Wells (1998)
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Barnard, et. al 2007
When they analyzed the data from the survey of the facutly members, they categorized a descipline as:
- hard or soft refers to the degree of paradigmatic development of a field.”Disciplines such as chemistry, biology, and mathematics, for example, were categorized as hard
while disciplines such as political science, psychology, and fields in the fine arts were
categorized as soft. “ - pure and applied.
Procedure
As the researchers did not have direct access to the e-mail addresses of faculty members across
colleges of the university, participation of faculty members was solicited by requesting
individual departmental and college administrators to forward the recruitment e-mail message to
their respective listservs of faculty members. The researchers also posted a similar recruitment
message that was distributed via a university-wide faculty e-mail listserv system after university
administrative approval.To read list:
- Generally, the attitudes of faculty members towards persons with disabilities become more positive with years of experience in higher education (Leyser et al., 1998) along with their epistemological beliefs becoming more sophisticated (Schommer-Aikins, Duell, & Hutter, 2005; Schommer, 1993).
- hard or soft refers to the degree of paradigmatic development of a field.”Disciplines such as chemistry, biology, and mathematics, for example, were categorized as hard
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Schraw , 2001
Epistemological theoretical framework used in my dissertation kinda evaluates or even judge faculty members. I feel it will be difficult to investigate on this aspect, and it will be embarrassing to ask faculty members questions like that.
Anyhow, it is really embarrassing to use faculty members as the participants in my study…
Unless, I use them as clients and to ask to evaluate certain CMSs.
So, what is the theoretical framework behind this?????P458
“A fourth area of future research is to investigate the stability of beliefs across a variety of demographic variables such as age, gender, culture, and academic domain… Jehng et al. (1993) also reported that epistemological beliefs differed across academic domains. Those in the hard sciences, such as physics and engineering, reported more sophisticated beliefs than those in education and the humanities.”p460
“School shape and change beliefs, both as purveyors of knowledge and as epistemological training grounds for developing students. The existing research invites the conclusion that schools should make the effort to change beliefs in positive ways, although it is less clear how those changes should occur”.Possible research question: which dimension of epistomological belief influence faculty members’ decision of assessment practice?
P456
“There is widespread agreement among researchers that epistemological beliefs develop over time, particularly as a function of college and graduate education”.p460-461
“Third, for better or worse, teachers model their beliefs for students. It makes sense to help teachers become more aware of their own beliefs, how they model those beliefs, and how their beliefs affect students’ own beliefs and learning”.P461
“These include helping teachers to understand their own beliefs, understanding factors that impact students’ beliefs, promoting a critical thinking pedagogy, and introducing conceptual change into the classroom.”
Possible research question:
To what extent are faculty members aware of their own epistemological beliefs?
To what extent are faculty members aware of the way to model their own beliefs and how their beliefs affect students’ own beliefs and learning?
To what extent do faculty members understand factors that impact students’ beliefs? (To what extent do faculty members agree that their assessment practice influence their student’s epistemological beliefs?)P. 463
“Indeed, social activities may be ideally suited to develop what Tishman et al. refer to as a “thinking dispositions” that promote deeper learning and critical reasoning”.“Reading the second questions, we must focus more attention on developing a guiding model of epistemological beliefs and to use this model to change educaitonal practice”.