Culture Specificity And Generality In The Development Of Personal Epistemology

Peoples'thinking about the nature of knowledge and knowing, or what has been termed"personal epistemology", has shown to be related to learning and achievement in various ways, influence cognitive processes such as reasoning and judgment throughout everyday lives and have implications for teaching by a large body of work in recent decades since the paradigm shift from an exclusive interest in cold, decontextualized cognition toward an interest in hot, situated cognition in educational psychology and a growing interest in the territory of meta-cognition in cognitive psychology. Although there is increasing attention to both theory building and empirical investigations in the realm of personal epistemology, issues such as domain and/or cultural specificity of personal epistemology, condition and implication of the development of individual's epistemological understanding still leave without reaching an agreement. The present study involved 127 Chinese middle and high school students, focused on the issues mentioned above. Investigation was theoretically based on the developmental model of epistemological understanding proposed by Kuhn, which includes three levels of thinking about knowledge and knowing: absolutist, multiplist, evaluativist and two major transitions that constitute the progression across five judgment domains. Results were compared with that from the research of Kuhn and Mason, using the same scale. The main results and conclusions were as below:1 The progression varied across domains. 77% participants showed developmental patterns across different domains that regarded as theoretically consistent and interpretable. The sequence of attainment across domains was largely reversed for the two transitions, as predicted, with the transition to the multiplist level most likely to appear first in personal taste and aesthetic judgment domains and last in the social and physical truth domains. Transition to the evaluativist level, in contrast, was most likely to appear first in truth domains. Consistent with results in the USA and Italy, values and physical truth are the domains in which an individual who has largely made the transition to multiplism is most likely to show a lingering absolutism.2 Of the 127 participants, 78% expressed overall multiplist positions, 12% evaluativist positions and 10% absolutist positions. Referred to the first transition, percentage of middle school students who hold absolutist position was larger than that of high school students. At the second transition, there appeared no progression toward the evaluativist level of understanding with the increase in grade. Statistical analysis by gender revealed no differences. Analysis by culture showed that middle school students in China were more likely to hold absolutist positions in domains of personal taste and aesthetic judgment, but harder to be at evaluativist level in domain of judgment about social truth.3 Participants at the multiplist level of epistemological understanding in judgment about social truth showed better academic achievement on science discipline. Level of epistemological understanding did not play a significant role in argumentation quality of socio-scientific issues.4 Examination of developmental patterns across different countries revealed both similarities and differences. The developmental model of personal epistemology proposed by Kuhn seemed to be supported in different cultures. The sensitivity of the instrument, which developed by Kuhn and her colleagues to capture the complexity of epistemology called for further consideration.