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Are They Ready Yet? Developmental Issues
dispositions. Although there are many different taxonomies of important thinking dispo-
sitions available (Ennis, 1987; Facione & Facione, 1995; Perkins et al., 1993) most lists
include traits such as (a) truth-seeking—a desire to know the truth even when it is
unpleasant, (b) intellectual curiosity—an interest in learning for learning’s sake, (c) intel-
lectual humility—a recognition of one’s own limited understanding and information,
(d) open-mindedness—a willingness to consider widely divergent views, (e) trust of
reason—the confidence that reason works, and (f ) intellectual maturity—a tolerance for
ambiguity, for withholding judgment, and for the tentative nature of most knowledge.
There is good evidence that these dispositions are tied to a number of positive educa-
tional outcomes including the use of critical thinking skills (Halpern, 1998; Hofer &
Pintrich, 1997; Klaczynski, 2000; Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002; Sa, Stanovich, & West,
1999). The question is how does one teach these dispositions? Are they even teachable?
How malleable are these attitudes? To this point almost all of the work on critical thinking
dispositions has been theoretical, and little empirical research exists concerning these dis-
positions. However, one of the most promising avenues of theory and research related to
the critical thinking dispositions is in the area of personal epistemology.
Personal Epistemology
From the perspective of the discipline of philosophy, epistemology concerns the origin,
nature, limits, methods, and justification of human knowledge (Hofer, 2002). The study
of personal epistemology, on the other hand, refers to how the individual develops concep-
tions of knowledge—the nature of knowledge, how knowledge is generated, and how one
comes to know what one knows. These issues are implicated in how students study, how
much and in what ways they value their peers in the classroom, what they expect from
faculty, and in their reasons for being in school. Personal epistemology influences compre-
hension, cognitive processing, conceptual change, and learning (Hofer, 2004a). It may be
that differences in personal epistemology are the source of much of faculty frustration in
their attempts to teach higher order thinking skills to students. Not only are students at
different places in their epistemology from each other, but on the whole they are at a very
different place than are faculty. There is often a large disconnection between teachers’
assumptions about knowledge and learning and students’ assumptions. It is an axiom of
educational theory that the most important factor governing what students learn is what
they already know. The research on personal epistemology indicates that what students
believe about what they know may be more important than what they actually know
(Klazsynski, 2000; Sa et al., 1999; Schommer-Aikens & Easter, 2006).
Research into personal epistemology began with the work of Perry (1970) and has grown
extensively in the past 15 years (Moore, 2002). While research in this area has engaged
scholars from a variety of fields, research paradigms, and areas of interest, there are two
primary directions epistemology research has taken (Hofer, 2002). The one direction fol-
lows the Piagetian paradigm of charting a developmental sequence of cognitive changes;
the other approaches personal epistemology as a system of more-or-less independent
beliefs on four or five dimensions that may develop asynchronously (Schommer, 1994).