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We set out to investigate preservice teachers' beliefs about sources of teaching knowledge and their motivation to learn from practice and theory in teacher education in a longitudinal study (n = 96, at the beginning of the study). Participants placed more trust in experiential knowledge sources compared with formalized sources and participants' beliefs about sources of teaching knowledge generally predicted their motivation to learn from different sources. Quantitative results were further supported and elaborated by qualitative interview data that suggested development of preservice teachers' beliefs about sources of teaching knowledge and their understanding of the relation between theoretical and practical knowledge over time. The findings extend existing literature by providing a window on how (preservice) teachers may articulate their views about sources of teaching knowledge and relations between theory and practice, with expected consequences for teaching practice. Implications for teacher educators' practice are also discussed.

One-hundred and twenty-two undergraduates completed a survey assessing beliefs that WM is a stable trait, or that it is quality that can be improved with skill training. They then read an authentic set of journal articles in a special issue, which discussed whether a program called CogMed is or is not effective in promoting WM functioning. Students evaluated the usefulness of the articles for understanding the issue and justified their decisions. Students believing that WM is malleable evaluated articles questioning CogMed's effectiveness as less useful, and one recognizing its promise as more useful. They were also less likely to question the quality of methods used in pro-CogMed articles. Students believing that WM is a fixed trait, however, evaluated belief-inconsistent articles more critically as uninteresting, task-irrelevant, having poorer-quality argumentation, and having less trustworthy authors. Limitations and future directions of the current work are discussed.

Beliefs about the certainty of teaching knowledge may influence how preservice teachers engage with and learn from knowledge sources in teacher education, and their subsequent practice. In light of inconsistencies in prior findings that mainly employ epistemic questionnaires, we extended research focusing on a contextual analysis. Sixty-six elementary and lower-secondary preservice teachers in Norway responded to the Beliefs about the Certainty of Teaching Knowledge (BECK) scale in the first and second year of study, respectively. Participants believed knowledge about teaching and learning was more tentative and evolving at T2 than at T1 (t (65) = 2.0, p = 0.049, Cohen's d = 0.23). We uncovered beliefs about the ways knowledge and practice will change, reasons for change, and the rate of change in teaching knowledge. The results suggest preservice teachers hold specific beliefs about the certainty of teaching knowledge that should be addressed by teacher educators.

There is increasing evidence to show that teachers' epistemic cognition is related to how they conceive of and engage in teaching; therefore it is important that teachers develop adaptive epistemic cognition. This article provides an overview of the different ways of theorizing and investigating changes in epistemic cognition for teaching and learning. A growing body of research shows that explicit reflection on epistemic cognition may be a useful way to promote change. Drawing on the work of Lunn Brownlee and Schraw and the Advanced Study Colloquium group described in the introduction to this special issue, we extend the concept of explicit reflection to encompass reflexive thinking. Reflexivity involves critical thinking that evaluates multiple perspectives in context and leads to specific action in the classroom. The 3R-EC Framework (Reflection, Reflexivity and Resolved Action for Epistemic Cognition) for theorizing change in epistemic cognition is described and exemplified in the contexts of classroom practice and teachers' professional learning.

We examined the role of justification for knowing beliefs in learning and comprehension when ethnic majority and ethnic minority students from the same school classes read five conflicting documents on the scientific issue of sun exposure and health. Results showed that the more ethnic minority students trusted scientific authorities and the less they relied on personal opinion when validating knowledge claims in the domain of science, the more they learned from and the better they comprehended the documents. In contrast, justification for knowing beliefs did not seem to play a role in learning and comprehension among ethnic majority students. These results may reflect that the documents represented more of a challenge to the ethnic minority students, with justification beliefs affecting learning and comprehension processes to a greater extent when the task is perceived as an ill-structured problem. This study is probably the first to indicate different relationships between various justification beliefs and performance in different language and cultural groups, having theoretical as well as educational implications.

Students read six documents that varied in terms of their perspectives on a scientific issue and the trustworthiness of the source features. After reading, students wrote essays, rank-ordered the documents according to perceived trustworthiness, and provided reasons for their rank-order decisions. Students put the most trust in a textbook and a public information text, primarily giving content reasons for their trustworthiness judgments. The kind of source characteristics that students drew upon when deciding what to trust and what not to trust varied across documents. Finally, their source evaluation was related to the source citations included in their essays.

Nowadays, students are required to use multiple information sources to complete tasks, both in and out of school. The beliefs that students hold about knowledge and knowing--their epistemic beliefs-- have been linked to successful integration of information across multiple texts. Framed by literature on epistemic belief research from an educational psychology perspective, this article reviews a recent Norwegian program of research on students' epistemic beliefs. The research has implications for educational research and practice that are discussed.

Building on the multidimensional framework of epistemic cognition proposed by Greene et al. ("Educational Psychologist" 43:142--160, 2008), this study examined beliefs about justification of knowledge claims in science among 65 Norwegian 10th graders. The first research question asked whether beliefs in personal justification, justification by authority, and justification by multiple sources differed in strength among the participants. It was found that the students most strongly believed in justification by authority, followed by justification by multiple sources and personal justification. The second research question asked whether the three types of justification beliefs differentially and uniquely predicted the comprehension of multiple conflicting documents on a science issue. In a multiple regression analysis with multiple-documents comprehension indicated by essay performance as the dependent variable, both personal justification and justification by multiple sources emerged as unique predictors when topic knowledge was controlled for. Specifically, beliefs in personal opinion as a means of justifying knowledge claims in science was negatively related to multiple-documents comprehension, whereas beliefs in justification through corroboration across multiple sources of information were positively related to multiple-documents comprehension. This study provides new evidence about relationships between epistemic beliefs and new literacy competencies needed in an information society, such as integrating across multiple conflicting sources of information; relationships that may also have practical implications.

Using cluster-analysis in a sample of 65 Norwegian 10th graders, we identified subgroups characterized by relatively high levels of knowledge combined with relatively low beliefs in personal justification of knowledge claims, as well as subgroups characterized by the opposite pattern of knowledge and personal justification. Moreover, the high knowledge/low personal justification groups differed with respect to the strengths of their beliefs in justification by authority and justification by multiple sources. After having read multiple conflicting texts on a science topic, the majority of students increased their knowledge about the topic and lowered their beliefs in personal justification, combining this pattern with higher beliefs in either justification by authority or justification by multiple sources. The subgroup characterized by relatively high level of knowledge and relatively low level of personal justification in combination with strong beliefs in justification by multiple sources performed best on a multiple-text comprehension measure. Theoretical and educational implications of the study are discussed. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

Sixty-five Norwegian 10th graders used the software Read&Answer 2.0 (Vidal-Abarca et al., 2011) to read five different texts presenting conflicting views on the controversial scientific issue of sun exposure and health. Participants were administered a multiple-choice topic-knowledge measure before and after reading, a word recognition task, and a reading motivation inventory that included two dimensions: Science reading self-efficacy, focusing on readers' beliefs about their capabilities to comprehend what they read in science, and science reading task value, focusing on readers' beliefs about how important, useful, and interesting it is to comprehend science texts. In addition, strategic reading pattern was assessed in terms of the degree of non-linear reading behavior. Multiple regression analysis showed that word recognition skills strongly predicted learning from the texts, as assessed by participants' increase in topic knowledge. However, when multiple-text comprehension indicated by performance on open-ended short-essay questions was the dependent variable, not only word recognition but also strategic reading pattern and science reading self-efficacy emerged as unique predictors when topic knowledge was controlled for. Science reading task value was not related to performance. This study provides new evidence that new literacy competencies needed in a knowledge society, such as synthesizing or integrating across multiple conflicting sources of information, still largely involve word-level, strategic, and motivational processes that may profitably be targeted through systematic instruction.

This study used think-aloud methodology to explore undergraduates' spontaneous attention to and use of source information while reading six documents that presented conflicting views on a controversial social scientific issue in a Google-like environment. Results showed that students explicitly and implicitly paid attention to sources of documents as well as sources cited within documents and that their attention to source information was associated with its use in evaluating, predicting, and interpreting the content of the documents. Students' sourcing activity varied across documents. The two documents that took the strongest, opposing stances on the controversy elicited the most sourcing. We also observed that, in essays they wrote on the controversy, students' spontaneous sourcing activity was related to their citation of a particularly trustworthy source. The study's theoretical implications are discussed in terms of the Documents Model framework. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

This study used think-aloud methodology to investigate 51 Norwegian undergraduates' topic-specific epistemic cognition while working with six documents presenting conflicting views on the issue of cell phones and potential health risks. Results showed that students' epistemic cognition was represented by one dimension concerning the certainty and simplicity of knowledge and three dimensions concerning the justification for knowing by different sources. Moreover, components of a mechanism of change, in particular epistemic doubt and resolution strategies, were identified in the think-aloud protocols. Finally, these mechanism of change components seemed to operate within distinct dimensions of epistemic cognition. Three case studies were used to elaborate on and illustrate how epistemic cognition may be differently involved in the reading of multiple conflicting documents over the course of reading. (Contains 7 tables and 1 figure.)