ABSTRACT
This chapter examines adults’ beliefs about the nature and acquisition of knowledge, or epistemic beliefs. Our main goal is to describe the development of an epistemic beliefs scale modeled after Schommer’s (1990) four-factor instrument. Previous research has linked epistemic beliefs to a variety of cognitive tasks, including moral and argumentative reasoning (Bendixen, Schraw, & Dunkle, 1998; Kuhn, 1991; Walker, Rowland, & Boyes, 1991), reflective judgment (Kitchener & King, 1981), cognitive development (Benack & Basseches, 1989; Chandler, Boyes, & Ball, 1990), and reading comprehension (Cunningham & Fitzgerald, 1996). These studies suggest two general outcomes. One is that it is possible to measure different epistemic beliefs. A second is that these beliefs are related to thinking, problem solving, and reasoning in important ways.
