Teachers' Epistemic Cognition in the Context of Dialogic Practice: A Question of Calibration?

Abstract

In this article, we argue that teachers' epistemic cognition, in particular their thinking about epistemic aims and reliable processes for achieving those aims, may impact students' understanding of complex, controversial issues. This is because teachers' epistemic cognition may facilitate or constrain their implementation of instruction aiming to engage students in reasoned argumentation through classroom dialogue. We also suggest that teachers may need to reflect on their own epistemic cognition in the context of dialogue-based instruction in order to calibrate it with the aim of deep understanding and the reliable process of reasoned argumentation, which underlie such instruction. Based on our discussion of relevant theoretical frameworks and related empirical evidence, we identify several promising directions for future theoretical and empirical work in this area. In a unique way, this article brings together theoretical frameworks and bodies of empirical work that hitherto have been discussed separately to provide new insights into the potential relationship between teachers' epistemic cognition and students' understanding.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article was initiated in discussions with other participants in the Advanced Study Colloquium on Changing Personal Epistemologies in Teaching and Teacher Education: A Focus on Reflection and Reflexivity, which took place in Limmasol, Cyprus, in August 2015.

FUNDING

The colloquium was funded by the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction.

Notes

¹ The term adaptive has largely replaced the term sophisticated in theory and research on epistemic cognition, because the term sophisticated may indicate that some forms of epistemic cognition are universally effective or availing independent of context, whereas the term adaptive signals that what is sophisticated epistemic cognition in one context may not necessarily be so in other contexts (see, e.g., Bråten, Strømsø, & Samuelstuen, 2008; Hofer & Sinatra, 2010).

² The epistemic cognition framework proposed by Chinn and colleagues (Chinn et al., 2011; Chinn & Rinehart, 2016; Chinn et al., 2014) consists of several components and subcomponents. One of the main components, epistemic ideals, refers to “the standards that a person uses to evaluate whether epistemic ends have been achieved” (Chinn et al., 2014, p. 426), and includes epistemic cognition concerning the structure of knowledge and the justification for knowing (cf. Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). Although epistemic ideals and its subcomponents may also be relevant aspects of teachers' epistemic cognition that potentially impact their teaching practice, our focus is on the epistemic aim of deep understanding and the reliable process of reasoned argumentation in this article. This focus is because our discussion centers on how teachers' thinking about these specific aspects of epistemic cognition may, in turn, influence students' construction of deep understanding by means of evidence-based argumentation with multiple sources of information.

³ In this article, we treat epistemic cognition and the process of argumentation as distinct constructs. Specifically, we regard people's thinking about argumentation as a reliable process to achieve particular epistemic aims as epistemic cognition, not argumentation per se. This approach finds support in Chinn and colleagues' (Chinn et al., 2011; Chinn & Rinehart, 2016; Chinn et al., 2014) discussions of their framework of epistemic cognition. At the same time, we acknowledge that Chinn and colleagues also described uses of reliable processes in ways suggesting that they considered enacted reliable processes as part of epistemic cognition, which seems to imply theoretical overlap between epistemic cognition and argumentation. Our decision to regard people's thinking (cognitions or conceptions) about argumentation, rather than argumentation per se, as epistemic cognition is thus based on an interpretation of Chinn and colleagues' framework that may be disputed. However, this interpretation is consistent with our definition of epistemic cognition as concerning how individuals think about what they know, what knowledge is, and how they know what they know (Sandoval et al., 2016).