ABSTRACT
Research in students’ epistemic cognition is typified by much good faith effort designed to reveal the role of epistemic cognitions in classroom performance and the increasing sophistication of students’ reasoning about ill-structured problems. Despite this effort, it is often difficult to assess the quality of such research and to integrate this area of research with other perspectives. Part of the difficulty, we believe, is due to the fact that researchers often fail to attend to significant issues in the design of studies and appropriate use of standard statistical techniques, such as analysis of variance and factor analysis. A second problem results from the use of research designs that do not anticipate the alternative explanations that a reasonable skeptic could raise regarding proposed effects. The aim of this chapter is to promote better practices in the design and analysis of epistemology research by outlining some of these considerations.
