Understanding Students' Practical Epistemologies and Their Influence on Learning Through Inquiry.

The article focuses on the understanding of student's practical epistemologies and their influence on learning through inquiry. Current standards argue that inquiry should be a central strategy of science instruction, for several reasons. These reasons include that students will learn science concepts more deeply as well as develop their skills of doing science. A major reason is that inquiry is presumed to be a way to help students develop a sophisticated understanding of the nature of science. Epistemology is a term used quite differently by philosophers and psychologists. It will be helpful to briefly introduce some definitions to clarify the argument to follow, although the definitions of formal and practical epistemologies that is mentioned here will be expanded upon at greater length throughout the paper. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the study of knowledge. It is concluded by the authors that this paper has been successful to lay out an agenda for studying epistemology in science education in ways that can couple students' epistemological development to their practices of inquiry.