Path Analysis Of Influence Of Biological Epistemological Beliefs On Academic Achievement Among High School Students

Students' epistemological beliefs are formed based on learning and teaching experience.In a sense,it is a reflection of school education and teaching.Epistemological belief refers to an unswerving attitude and concept that students have about the nature of knowledge and knowing.Studies have shown that epistemological beliefs not only affect students' critical thinking,achievement goal-orientation,learning strategies and final learning outcomes,but also play an important role in students' career development and lifelong learning.The study takes the epistemological beliefs of high school students in special fields as the breakthrough point,and aims to investigate the epistemological beliefs of high school students in the context of biology learning,explore the influence path of epistemological beliefs on academic achievements,and make targeted teaching suggestions.This study uses the self-compiled "Biological Epistemology Belief Scale" as a tool and selects 668 students from three grades in three high schools in Jiangxi Province as the research objects to investigate their current status of epistemological beliefs in the context of biological learning.And the study assumes critical thinking,achievement goal-orientation and learning strategies as intermediary factors,selecting163 high school sophomores as the research objects,uses structural equation modeling to analyze the influence path of epistemological beliefs on academic achievement.The research results show that,(1)In the context of biology learning,high school students have a low level of overall epistemological belief(M=4.865),and the highest level of belief of Justification of Knowledge relatively(M=5.485),indicating that high school students tend to believe that experiments can demonstrate biological knowledge.And they have the lowest level of belief of Source of Knowledge relatively(M=3.725),indicating that high school students are more likely to believe in external authority and show a tendency to be simple and naive;(2)There is no significant difference about their biology epistemological beliefs and and their dimensions in gender,but there are significant differences of varying degrees in grade,parental relationship,parental education level and family residence;(3)Critical thinking,mastery goals,performance-approach goals and deep learning strategies as intermediate variables,make epistemological beliefs indirectly and positively predict academic achievement,with a total influence ability of 0.574;(4)The Influencing paths of epistemological beliefs to academic achievement produce 6 paths where critical thinking is a key intermediate element;(5)Total influence abilities of epistemological beliefs on critical thinking,mastery orientation,performance-approach goals and deep learning strategies were 0.598,0.584,0.705,0.42,respectively;(6)Critical thinking can directly and positively predict mastery orientation and performance-approach goals,with influence abilities of 0.238 and 0.232,respectively.