Epistemological Resources and a Developmental Assessment

Steelers 21, Seahawks 10. I was rooting for Seattle since it was their first Super Bowl appearance, but it's good to see the Lombardi Trophy stay in the AFC. Maybe next year will bring some better post-season play from the Pats.

Anyway...

There were a total of four papers that I found the other night at UM, and the next one I want to talk about is by Tsai and Liu, called "Developing a Multi-dimensional Instrument for Assessing Students' Epistemological Views toward Science" and published in the October 2005 issue (v27, n13) of International Journal for Science Education. In this paper, students used Likert scales to "agree" or "disagree" with a number of statements that probed their epistemological view of science. The "multi-dimensional" aspect is really just the further differentiation of epistemological resources into five major categories: social negotiation, inventive and creative nature, theory-laden explanation, cultural impacts, and changing and tentative features. Within each of these categories are a minimum of three ideas (I'll include them in my model as specific resources); social negotiation has 6, inventive and creative nature has 4, and the other three categories each have 3 resources within that category.