The Nature and Development of a Personal Epistemology in College Students
David Hunter and Catherine Cooke-Cottone
Being a critical thinker requires having both skills and dispositions, and recent research has
suggested that students might acquire the analytical and evaluative skills needed for being a
critical thinker without acquiring the inclination to use those skills when appropriate. This has
raised both pedagogical and assessment questions. How can we teach students to have the
dispositions, and how can we tell when they have acquired them? Our research aims to identify
developmental stages in undergraduates that may influence the acquisition of those dispositions.
Our hypothesis is that the stages involve a subject’s personal epistemology, her conception of
what it takes to know something, and that a subject’s critical thinking disposition increase as her
personal epistemology becomes more sophisticated. This hypothesis builds on developmental
work from Piaget and the recent work on critical thinking by King and Kitchener.
We have developed an assessment tool, a series of short answer questions, that we believe can be
used to measure the sophistication of a subject’s personal epistemology. Our immediate aim is to
establish the validity of the measure. We have administered the instrument and will soon begin to
analyze the data. Once we have established the validity of the instrument, we plan to look for
correlations between the level of a subject’s personal epistemology and her background and
training.