January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

ased on an integration and evaluation of data and/or opinions. Therefore, during the reflective judgment stage, one
is able to engage in rational inquiry and derive a reasoned judgment.
Research findings established a relationship between epistemological beliefs and reasoning about ill-structured
problems (Bendixen & Schraw 2001; Bendixen, Dunkle, & Schraw, 1994; Bendixen, Schraw, & Dunkle, 1998;
Schommer & Dunnell, 1997; Sinatra, Southerland, McConaughy, & Demastes, 2003). For example, research by
Bendixen, Dunkle, and Schraw (1994) showed that students who view ability as innate and thus fixed may be less
inclined to develop and use advanced reasoning skills when thinking about ill-structured issues. Also research by
Schraw, Dunkle, and Bendixen (1995) found that well-structured and ill-structured problems engaged different
epistemological beliefs. Schommer and Dunnell (1997) found that the more students believed that the ability to learn
is fixed at birth, that learning is quick or not-at-all, and that knowledge is unchanging, the more likely they were to
write overly simplistic solutions to problems.
A question that could be asked at this point is whether different research results could be obtained if socio-cultural
aspects of learning were taken into consideration in the aforementioned research studies. We believe this is a very
important question that needs to be investigated, because more and more people form partnerships and think with
others, and thus it has become widely accepted that cognitions are not decontextualized tools and products of mind,
but situated and distributed. In spite of this, research has not addressed closely the role of social context on one’s
epistemological beliefs. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to remedy for this lack of research in the current body of
literature and sought to answer the following questions:
1. What are the elements of students’ reasoning when thinking about an ill-structured problem in solo and paired
problem-solving contexts?
2. What is the relationship between students’ epistemological beliefs and students’ reasoning when thinking about
an ill-structured problem in solo and paired problem-solving contexts?
Methodology
Participants
Twenty graduate students from a teacher education department volunteered to participate in this small scale
exploratory study. The majority of the participants were females. The average age of the participants was 23.5 years.
Instruments
Epistemological beliefs questionnaire
The Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) was used for collecting data. The EBQ consisted of five questions
measuring participants’ perceived importance of an ill-structured issue (question 1) and their epistemological beliefs
(questions 2-5). The questions on the EBQ were adapted from King and Kitchener’s (1994) interview questions.
Question 1 was a Likert-type question with ratings from 7 (extremely important) to 1 (not important at all). The
question was simply asking each student to rate the importance of a complex geopolitical issue regarding the
reunification of Cyprus on the basis of the Annan Plan. Question 2 prompted the participants to state how it was
possible for two experts to express different points of view on the issue, and explain how this sort of disagreement
among experts could happen. Analogously, question 5 raised the issue of whether it could be known for sure that an
individual's position on a specific issue at hand was correct, and participants were asked to explain their answer
accordingly. Questions 3 and 4 dealt with how beliefs should be justified. Specifically, question 3 prompted the
participants to explain how two experts could justify different views on the same issue, and question 4 asked the
participants to explain how they themselves came to form and justify their point of view on the issue.
The data collected with the EBQ were analyzed with a three-stage rubric, shown in Table 1, which constituted an
adaptation of King and Kitchener’s (1994) seven-stage model to a simpler version. Specifically, we reduced the
original seven-stage model to a three-stage scheme because, “generally speaking, models of epistemological
development postulate three broad stages characterized first by absolutist beliefs, followed by the advent of relativist
beliefs, followed by the advent of pluralist beliefs in which beliefs are viewed as relative, but more or less defensible
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