Sixth-Grade Students' Epistemologies of Science: The Impact of School Science Experiences on Epistemological Development

Previous studies have documented that middle school students have a limited “knowl-edge unproblematic ” epistemology of science (i.e., scientists steadily amass more facts about the world by doing experiments) with no appreciation of the role played by scientists ’ ideas in guiding inquiry. An important question concerns to what extent students this age and younger are ready to restructure their epistemological views to focus on more “constructivist ” issues: the conjectural, explanatory, testable, and re-visable nature of theories. This study tests the claim that even elementary school stu-dents can make significant progress in developing a more sophisticated, constructivist epistemology of science, given a sustained elementary school science curriculum that is designed to support students ’ thinking about epistemological is-sues. To assess the impact of elementary science experiences on students’ epistemological views, 2 demographically similar groups of 6th-grade students were