Epistemologies of the Sciences, Humanities, and Social Sciences: Liberal Arts Students' Perceptions

Epistemologies of the Sciences, Humanities, and Social Sciences:Liberal Arts Students' Perceptions Rose M. Marra (bio) and Betsy Palmer (bio) To help students achieve the essential learning outcomes, it will be necessary to spend time, across all levels of school and college education, revisiting the larger purposes of education and rethinking the kinds of connections across disciplines and levels of learning that will best prepare graduates for a complex and fast-paced world. —Association of American Colleges and Universities (2007, p. 20) As this quotation from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) illustrates, an essential role of postsecondary institutions is preparing college graduates for the work world. In particular business leaders are calling for more and better liberal education to address the dynamic nature of today's job market and the global economy. Yet one recurring critique of the current practices at many institutions is that the knowledge disseminated in the classroom is taught in an isolated and disconnected fashion, both within general education requirements and between general education and the major (AAC&U, 2007; Arnold, 2006). All types of academic institutions focus on the creation and dissemination of knowledge as a fundamental goal of the institution (Altbach, 1998), and in the case of disseminating knowledge, at least a part of that defining activity takes place in the classroom. There is little disagreement about the responsibility of faculty to teach knowledge, and yet we rarely discuss whether we share [End Page 100] with our students an understanding of what "knowledge" is, how knowledge is created, and the implications of these beliefs and activities. Nor do we discuss how knowledge claims in one discipline might relate to knowledge claims in another. General education courses are no different from others in their obligation to address this need, and one might argue that the need to address our understandings of disciplinary knowledge and the interrelationship of knowledge claims across disciplines in these courses is increasing. Epistemology refers to the study of knowledge and sources of knowledge. The term personal epistemology has recently been adopted by educational theorists to refer specifically to the beliefs an individual learner holds regarding the complexity and certainty of knowledge, the process of knowing, and the sources and justification of knowledge claims (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). Although there are many theories of personal epistemology in the educational literature (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997), most developmentally based theories agree on a common pattern of cognitive development that progresses from simple, right/wrong thinking, through an exploration of multiple perspectives, to an understanding of knowledge and knowing that uses contextualized and reasoned choices among competing beliefs. Nondevelopmental theories examine an interconnected set of beliefs about knowledge and learning but do not necessarily contradict the underlying construct of simple versus complex epistemological perspectives (Schommer, 1993, 1994). Early explorations of epistemology assumed that individuals hold a uniform personal epistemology across knowledge domains. Somewhat recently, discipline-specific epistemologies have been proposed and studied (Hofer, 2000; Jehng, Johnson, & Anderson, 1993; Paulsen & Wells, 1998; Schommer, 1993). In a prior qualitative study, we proposed a grounded theory of college student understandings of discipline-specific epistemologies in the sciences and humanities. In a study of sixty undergraduate students, we proposed a grounded theory that individual students may exhibit differing and conflicting epistemologies in these two broad disciplinary domains (Palmer & Marra, 2004). Our original grounded theory was derived from a sample of junior and senior science and engineering majors. Even though these students had accumulated fewer courses in the humanities, half of the sample still exhibited more sophisticated epistemologies in humanities than in sciences. Another subset described a more complex set of beliefs about knowledge in the sciences than in the humanities (Palmer & Marra, 2004). The current study tested the original grounded theory with a new set of juniors and seniors who were, in contrast to the original sample, primarily studying the liberal arts. In this qualitative analysis, we sought to determine if the original grounded theory that showed discipline-specific epistemologies in the sciences versus the humanities applied [End Page 101] to a new sample of students. Based on the data from both studies we also expand the original theory, developing a more complex picture of how domain...