STUDENTS' EPISTEMOLOGICAL BELIEFS ABOUT SCIENCE: THE IMPACT OF SCHOOL SCIENCE EXPERIENCE.

The science epistemological beliefs of students have been found to play an important role in determining their learning orientations towards science. Conley, Pintrich, Vekiri, & Harrison (2004) developed a measure to examine the epistemology beliefs of students about science. The measure encompasses four dimensions about scientific knowledge: source, certainty, development and justification. The purpose of this study was to look at the reliability of this measure in the Singapore context and to find out the epistemological beliefs of Singapore students about science. The findings showed that the four scales have relatively good reliability in term of internal consistency. The alpha-coefficient of the scales ranged from .65 to .84. The scale reliability obtained with the Singapore sample is comparable to that obtained by Conley et al. (2004). With respect to the epistemological beliefs of students the mean scores on all the scales were above 4.5 on a 6-point scale. This indicates that the students in Singapore have fairly sophisticated beliefs about scientific knowledge. The article discusses some implications of the findings for science education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]