BACKGROUND In recent decades, two lines of research, phenomenographic and meta-cognitive, have examined students' approaches and epistemological beliefs about learning. To date there has been very little research describing the change in epistemological beliefs in European secondary students, or analysing interrelationships between epistemological beliefs and approaches in order to explain thei...

0039-3 doi:10 E-m So, the further I get with the description of the radical social constructionist programme and a particular version of postmodernism, coupled to the acid tools of critical discourse in the human sciences, themore nervous I get.Like all neuroses,mine is rooted in the problem of metaphor, that is, the problem of the relation of bodies and language. (Donna Haraway, 1991, p. 185, ...

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to determine if there is a relationship between middle school students’ epistemological beliefs and Piagetian stages of cognitive development and (b) if there is a relationship between epistemological beliefs and academic performance. Epistemological beliefs were defined as how individuals come to know and the beliefs they hold about this knowledge. A ...

This study investigated the role of knowledge building in fostering conceptual and epistemological changes in the context of Grade 10 chemistry students collaborating on Knowledge Forum in a Hong Kong classroom. Participants were 40 experimental and 39 comparison students experiencing knowledge building and traditional instruction respectively. Students engaging in knowledge building posed ques...

PURPOSE This study was to explore the relationship between clinical performance examination (CPX) achievement and epistemological beliefs to investigate the potentials of epistemological beliefs in ill-structured medical problem solving tasks. METHODS We administered the epistemological beliefs questionnaire (EBQ) to fourth-year medical students and correlated the results with their CPX score...