On the Goals of Epistemic Education: Promoting Apt Epistemic Performance

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge in educational efforts to foster the development of learners’ epistemologies. Our 1^st aim is to problematize some current assumptions about the goals of epistemic education and to argue that existing models of lay or expert epistemologies cannot directly translate into educational goals. Our 2^nd aim is to present a fresh integrative analysis of the goals of epistemic education based on both philosophical arguments and empirical research. Synthesizing these sources, we propose that the overarching purpose of epistemic education is to promote learners’ apt epistemic performance, defined as performance that achieves valuable epistemic aims through competence. We identify 5 key aspects of epistemic performance that are important to achieving this goal: engaging in reliable cognitive processes that lead to the achievement of epistemic aims, adapting epistemic performance to diverse situations, metacognitively regulating and understanding epistemic performance, caring about and enjoying epistemic performance, and participating in epistemic performance together with others. Each of these aspects involves competent engagement with epistemic aims and value, epistemic ideals, and reliable epistemic processes. Our analysis can help educators plan and evaluate epistemic education and suggests ways in which current curricula might be better designed to promote epistemic growth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Michael Weinstock, Arnon Keren, Hanan Alexander, Ravit Golan Duncan, and the members of the Epistemic Education group at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education for helpful comments and discussions. The article also benefited greatly from the comments and advice of Jeremy Roschelle and three anonymous reviewers. Finally, we are grateful to Ernest Sosa for his comments and his support of cross-disciplinary dialog.

FUNDING

Sarit Barzilai’s work on this project was funded in part by the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence (I-CORE) Program of the Israel Council of Higher Education and the Israel Science Foundation under Grant No. 1716/12. Clark A. Chinn’s work on this project was funded in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1008634.

Notes

¹ It should be noted that some who espouse developmental models take a more complex view of the end goals of epistemic development (e.g., D. Kuhn, Wang, & Li, 2010).

² Generally speaking, virtue responsibilists and virtue reliabilists consider both cognitive abilities and intellectual dispositions valuable for excellent thinking, however they disagree about their status in constituting knowledge (Battaly, 2008; Greco & Turri, 2015; Sosa, 2015).

³ In this way, Sosa addresses the famous Gettier problem of achieving justified true beliefs by luck (Ichikawa & Steup, 2016). In Gettier cases, true beliefs are not due to the agent’s competence and therefore fall short of knowledge (Sosa, 2015).

⁴ Metacognitive processes might be reflective and conscious or automatic and unconscious (Koriat, 2007; Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters, & Afflerbach, 2006). Hence, fully apt judgments might also be made without conscious awareness (Sosa, 2015). However, critiquing and improving the processes by which such judgments are made is likely to require conscious reflective attention.

Additional information

Funding

Sarit Barzilai’s work on this project was funded in part by the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence (I-CORE) Program of the Israel Council of Higher Education and the Israel Science Foundation under Grant No. 1716/12. Clark A. Chinn’s work on this project was funded in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1008634.