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believe in quick learning tend to have poor reading comprehension and lower grade point
averages (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Klaczynski, 2000; Schommer-Aikens, 2004).
The research on epistemological beliefs is just moving out of the descriptive phase
and into the prediction and manipulation phase (Hofer, 2002; Schommer-Aikens,
2004). Newer models are currently being developed and examined that combine devel-
opmental theories and the independent belief system approach into a single model
(Bendixen & Rule, 2004; Hofer, 2004b; Schommer-Aikens, 2004). However, the pri-
mary question for educators is what we do with this information now that we have it.
How can knowing about our students’ personal epistemology help us teach them how
to become better thinkers? One important lesson we can glean from this research is that
changes in personal epistemology are slow. Since one’s personal epistemology is so heav-
ily implicated in one’s ability to value and use critical thinking skills, we can extrapolate
that growth in critical thinking ability is similarly slow (King & Kitchener, 2004).
Students are probably not going to become great critical thinkers across contexts because
of one excellent thinking-based course, a powerful research-methods sequence, or even
the opportunity to develop and execute their own research project. Even if education for
critical thinking skills is built into an entire program of study, progress may still be slow
and incremental. The development of critical thinking requires fairly substantial cogni-
tive reorganization for most of our students and a rather significant pedagogical com-
mitment on our part. Significant success in nurturing critical thinking probably requires
long-term strategies that flow across an entire curriculum rather than a few new exer-
cises added to our courses or a critical thinking supplement added to a textbook (not
that these are bad things).
There is good news here: Education helps (King & Kitchener, 2002). People who go
through college progress faster and farther than those who do not, even when we account
for socioeconomic status and IQ. The question is: How can we help our students do better
than they are currently doing? Piaget hypothesized that an uncomfortable disequilibrium
was required for people to accommodate their existing cognitive schema to new informa-
tion. Current research suggests that changes in epistemology require similar disequilib-
rium (Hofer, 2004b; King & Kitchener, 2004). This suggests our educational approach
should challenge students’ naïve epistemologies and support them as they try out new
modes of thinking. One important way to do this is to design our courses so that just
memorizing material will not lead to success. Prereflective thinkers too often look to pro-
fessors simply to provide them with the right answer, even when the instructor is exploring
a difficult or problematic issue. When we provide the “right” answer in lieu of teaching the
problems and ambiguities of the discipline, we reinforce lower levels of thinking in our
students. An important point for us to teach our students is that every declarative sentence
in psychology is an answer to a question someone once asked. Teaching students to think
like psychologists means teaching them to ask questions and interrogate methodologies
for answering the questions.
One thing Perry (1970) discovered, however, is that if the disequilibrium becomes too
uncomfortable students will regress to earlier modes of thinking. This implies that if we
want our students to grow, they must find our courses to be not only challenging but also
safe. It follows that students cannot be forced to become good thinkers by being badgered,
dismissed, or ridiculed (Baxter-Magolda, 2004). It appears that students learn best if they