The gap between knowledge and belief: narrative, affect and students’ deeper learning in higher education

ABSTRACT

One of the central challenges educators face today, especially in higher education, is the gap between warranted (domain-specific) knowledge and the prior beliefs students hold about certain concepts and phenomena (preconceptions). In the Internet age, students often self-directedly acquire knowledge from an increasingly large number of contradictory sources of information, many of which are biased or untrustworthy. Based on existing research, the study presented here explores the role of narratives in the context of student learning. We draw on an empirical study aimed at assessing students’ decision-making, the role of knowledge and belief, and students’ narrative competence. The performed qualitative analysis of cognitive interviews in which university students reflected on their information-processing and reasoning indicates that narratives can be central to unsettling the dichotomy between knowledge and belief. Students need to be equipped with the narrative competence to be aware of how narrative framing and metaphors used in texts guide their reasoning and decision-making not only at the cognitive but also at the affective level. After conducting a qualitative analysis of student’s answers, we discuss potentials for using narrative methodologies in instructional interventions and fostering students’ narrative competence in the higher education classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative competence
• narrative framing
• university students
• cognitive interviews
• narrative analysis
• instructional intervention

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two reviewers who provided constructive feedback and helpful guidance in the revision of this manuscript. The authors also would like to thank all students from the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz who participated in this study as well as the raters who evaluated the written responses.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was part of the Rhine-Main Universities Alliance (RMU) project, which was funded by the RMU fund.