One of the goals of science education is for students to learn to “think-like” experts in their discipline. Achieving this goal requires that students not only learn the content knowledge of that discipline but also the epistemology of the discipline, i.e.: the problems and research questions considered important and solvable; the criteria and methods for verification of knowledge claims; the ways of making meaning; and what is counted as knowledge. Just as academic disciplines differ in the subject matter that they teach, they also differ in significant ways regarding the construction, justification, and evaluation of knowledge. The epistemologies of disciplines – i.e. the fact that ecologists “think like” ecologists whereas historians “think like” historians, and these differences are significant and robust – are typically invisible to students. Teaching these differences explicitly not only promotes learning, but also can help students more fully enculturate into a scholarly community.
Writing courses are an ideal place to teach the epistemologies of our disciplines because faculty must make their own epistemic beliefs explicit when unpacking disciplinary-specific communication conventions and reader expectations. Additionally, a capstone thesis-writing course is the ideal testing ground for such a study because our students are already engaged in authentic scientific research and are highly motivated. In this study, we asked the following research questions: (1) Can we promote more sophisticated epistemic stances among our students with a short, in-class epistemology exercise? (2) If so, does this effort improve students’ writing (specifically, their ability to communicate clear science reasoning in their writing)? (3) What other gains do we see as a result of the development of epistemic beliefs?
Results/Conclusions
For students enrolled in these courses, we found significant gains among those who participated in the epistemology exercise (n=103) versus those who didn’t (n=91) in three dimensions: self-efficacy in writing (p=0.001, Cohen’s d effect size = 0.47), self-efficacy in science (p=0.05, Cohen’s d effect size = 0.28), and science reasoning (p=0.03, Cohen’s d effect size = 0.31). We also found a significant shift in epistemic stance – from non-evaluativist to evaluativists – for students who participated in the intervention versus those who didn’t (p=0.03, Cohen’s d effect size = 0.32). Combined, these results suggest that the relatively minimal effort required to implement this exercise offers considerable benefits to students, both in terms of learning gains and also their development as disciplinary scholars.