Epistemic Questions: Fostering Knowledge-Generation by the Students

Epistemic Questions: Fostering Knowledge-Generation by the Students

Epistemic questions aim at the acquisition of knowledge and they serve two purposes: Establishing epistemic goals for intentional learning and regulating the attainment of such goals. Epistemic questioning is an important skill for focusing and monitoring learning processes, and therefore it should be promoted among high-school students. A model to foster questioning for epistemic purposes is presented and applied in two studies. First, the acquisition of causal-explanatory knowledge was improved by a training session that involved asking epistemic questions in history lessons. Second, promoting students’ questions in planning experiments in chemistry lessons resulted in positive motivational effects and increased skills to formulate high-level research questions.