Faculty Publications

Students’ Epistemic Worldview Preferences Predict Selective Recall Across History And Physics Texts

Document Type

Article

Keywords

domain generality, epistemic beliefs, mechanism, organicism, selective recall, text comprehension

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Educational Psychology

Volume

36

Issue

1

First Page

73

Last Page

94

Abstract

This study evaluates the psychological reality of two sets of epistemic beliefs, or epistemic ‘worldviews’, called mechanism and organicism. One author who described these two worldviews, Stephen Pepper, hypothesised that they appear to possess domain-general characteristics. Although Pepper’s ideas have had a small presence in research across a variety of knowledge domains, they have been overlooked by epistemic beliefs researchers. This paper introduces Pepper’s epistemic worldviews to epistemic beliefs researchers by empirically demonstrating their purported domain-general capabilities. Participants read two texts about the French Revolution and quantum mechanics containing both mechanist and organicist descriptions. Then, they recorded as much as they could recall from both texts. Analyses of these free recall data reveal a significant interaction between participants’ worldview preference and the type of text that they recall across both texts. The data are interpreted to support the hypothesis that mechanism and organicism possess domain-general properties when learning from a text.

Department

Department of Educational Psychology and Foundations

Original Publication Date

1-2-2016

DOI of published version

10.1080/01443410.2014.907557

Repository

UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa

Language

en

Link to Full Text

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