City of motorcycles
Flying back to Manila this morning after two weeks of thinking about my thesis and wrestling with my writing. It’s been a great hiatus for me here in Taipei, which will always be for me the city of motorcycles.
The big ideas swirling in my head are all about why epistemology–those hidden beliefs about knowledge and knowing–are so important in education. What’s the big deal with epistemology anyway–especially now that our school is beginning to offer this IB course Theory of Knowledge to our students? Schommer (1994) comes up with an excellent and lucid summary of what the research claims are the effects of one’s personal epistemology on learning. She names four:
(a) Active engagement in learning: Some students believe that learning is simply passive listening, as in Belenky et al’s (1986) Silence and Received Knowledge. If that is the case, the students will never really get engaged in learning as an active participant and will keep relying on that sage on the stage. Moreover, active learning is unlikely to happen if one isn’t a big believer in one’s self as a source of knowledge and relies completely and uncritically on expert opinion (such as the teacher in the classroom).
(b) Persistence in difficult tasks: Those who believe that one’s intelligence is fixed and unchanging (fixed theorists) get negative and give up when facing difficult tasks. Confronted with easier tasks, they perform as well as the so-called “incremental theorists” who believe that one’s ability can improve in time, but when it comes to more challenging questions, the incremental theorists out-perform them. Likewise for those who believe that learning is quick and does not require time and effort–they become impatient and give up.
(c) Comprehension especially of academic texts: Several studies have shown that beliefs about knowledge and knowing that are more advanced equip students in their reading comprehension.
(d) Dealing with ill-structured problems: Well-structured problems (defined as questions with clear-cut answers and clear-cut ways of solving) don’t really touch on one’s epistemology. But dealing with ill-structured problems–or controversies–where “reasonable people can reasonably disagree” and which, by the way, are probably 75% of all problems we deal with outside the classroom, is very much enhanced when one has a more sophisticated conception of knowledge–that it isn’t simple and always certain and that one has to engage in independent reasoning (apart from relying on authority).
What’s important here, I think, is that even if we don’t talk about the students’ epistemologies, the often-unconscious epistemological beliefs of the teachers shape their students’ own epistemological development. The cues they send through their type of instruction and examinations teach students what knowledge is and what processes one should take to obtain knowledge. Teachers canonize particular epistemological beliefs even without discussing them explicitly.
strugglingSCHOLAR 