This week’s reading from the International Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2018) discussed several different topics within the greater learning sciences community. The one that especially caught my interest was the discussion in chapter 3 about epistemic cognition and development. The idea of epistemic practices, “socially normed activities that people carry out to accomplish epistemic aims such as developing evidence, arguments, theories, and so on” (Chinn & Sandoval 2018; Chp. 3, p. 25). This concept is very broadly applicable to scientific fields and ways of evaluating scientific merit. This discussion, as well as the quote “people’s specific metacognitive beliefs about whether and how biases and error can enter into scientific observations can affect critical choices about how to conduct observations” (Chinn & Sandoval 2018; Chp. 3, p. 25), brought up something that I’ve seen heavily discussed and partially addressed in astronomy.
In astronomy, it is a very common thing to write and submit scientific proposals for observation time on different telescopes and instruments. This can be an extremely competitive process, and thus necessitates a sizeable review process that weighs the relative scientific merits of the various proposals. This process is very much a “socially normed activity” within astronomy that seeks to decide, in the most objective way possible, who is awarded the resources to do their experiments and collect data. A recent example of the scrutiny of this epistemic practice is the astronomical community seeking to address concerns of gendered biases that are inherent in this review process. This reflection and analysis of the biases present has led to adoption of dual-anonymous reviews for resource allocation in astronomy (Strolger & Reid 2019). (By the way, I highly recommend reading their paper! Multiple agencies and even government entities have approached them about adopting their method!) I just was excited to be able to make this connection between my field and the learning sciences!
In addition to all of this, research on epistemic cognition brings up the idea of the “learning to learn” education model discussed in A. Brown et al. (1993) (p. 190). If a schooling environment seeks to prepare its students for the ways of thinking required by various disciplines, then the curriculum that is developed must reflect the differing epistemic ideals and reliable processes for achieving epistemic aims in these different fields (Chinn & Sandoval 2018, p. 29-30).
References:
Brown, A. L., Ash, D., Rutherford, M., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J. C. (1993). Distributed Expertise in the classroom. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 188-228). Cam- bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Chinn, C. & Sandoval, W. (2018). Epistemic cognition and epistemic development. In Fischer, F., Hmelo-Silver, C. E., Goldman, S. R., & Reimann, P. (Eds.), International Handbook of the Learning Sciences. Routledge.