Epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge as predictors of the construction of different types of arguments on socioscientific issues

By Andreani Baytelman, Kalypso Iordanou, C. P. Constantinou. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2020

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study investigates whether university students' epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge about controversial socio-scientific issues (SSIs) can predict the different types of arguments that students construct. Two hundred forty-three university students were asked to construct different types of supportive arguments - social, ethical, economic, scientific, ecological - as well as counterarguments and rebuttals after they had read a scenario on a SSI. Participants’ epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge were assessed separately. Results showed that students' epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge predicted the quantity, quality and diversity of the different types of arguments the students construct. In particular, students who held sophisticated epistemic beliefs about the structure of knowledge and exhibited relatively more robust prior knowledge scores produced arguments of greater quantity, better quality and higher diversity of argument types than students with less sophisticated epistemic beliefs and low prior knowledge scores. Educational implications are discussed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f942f2429866c6ddbc1cba3b4c6db1d9b0af3d72

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

The Multidimensional Knowledge in Text Comprehension framework (2021, background): “Certain studies explore the role of epistemic beliefs as well as prior knowledge (e.g., Baytelman et al., 2020; Ferguson & Bråten, 2013).”