Are epistemological beliefs similar across domains?

Abstract

Investigators of students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning, or epistemological beliefs, have generally assumed that epistemological beliefs are domain independent (i.e., they generalize across domains). The purpose of this research is to test this assumption. College students completed an epistemological questionnaire with a specific domain in mind (either social sciences or mathematics), read a passage (either social sciences or mathematics), answered a passage test, and completed another epistemological questionnaire with the alternative domain in mind. Results supported the idea that individuals' epistemological beliefs tend to be domain independent. Mathematical epistemological factors correlated with the corresponding social science epistemological factors. Epistemological beliefs in both domains predicted passage comprehension similarly, and most students showed a consistent level of epistemological sophistication across domains.

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