In the context of transforming educational systems and the expansion of selfdirected learning formats, epistemological beliefs and preferences are gaining importance as a cognitive resource of the learner’s personality. Learners’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing, and about their role in the learning process, are regarded in international psychology as a significant factor shaping selfregulation of learning, the interpretation of academic requirements, and the choice of informationprocessing strategies. Over recent decades, research on personal epistemology has shown steady growth and thematic differentiation, indicating its gradual institutionalization and consolidation as a distinct field of inquiry. In Russian educational psychology, however, the role of learners’ personal epistemology remains insufficiently examined and systematized, which limits the possibilities for integrating accumulated international findings into existing models and methods for assessing learning effectiveness. The aims of the study are to identify the structure and dynamics of international research on personal epistemology and to summarise its key directions. A combined bibliometric and theoreticalanalytical design was employed. Based on a corpus of 247 Scopusindexed publications, we analysed trends in publication activity, the distribution of publications across countries, journals and authors, citation patterns, and conducted topic modelling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation with tSNE topic visualisation. The theoretical analysis was aimed at interpreting the identified research lines. The results indicate a steady increase in publication activity since the late 1990s, accompanied by the institutionalization of this research direction and a concentration of studies in the USA and Western European countries. Topic analysis made it possible to distinguish four stable lines of development within this knowledge domain: epistemological beliefs in educational interaction, learners’ personal epistemology, domainspecificity of knowledge, and epistemological foundations of selfregulated learning. The analysis revealed pronounced terminological heterogeneity, reflecting differences in the levels at which epistemological phenomena are analysed (paradigmatic, structural, processual and regulatory), which complicates their conceptual comparison and the integration of research findings and points to the need for further theoretical consolidation of this research field. The findings provide an additional theoretical basis for integrating Russian and international traditions of research on epistemological factors of learning within educational psychology.
Elena Vladimirovna Bragina (Sun,) studied this question.