Students’ Understanding And Caring About Placing Trust In The Time Of Corona

Abstract

In a world increasingly shaped by science, there is a pressing need for citizens to be able to make informed judgment about knowledge claims in socioscientific issues. These are ill-structured problems, e.g., Covid-19 vaccine, climate change, energy crisis and obesity, that are inextricably linked with science and require both scientific and ethical reasoning for decision-making. Laypeople’s limited understanding of science often predisposes them to placing trust on science experts about these issues. To avoid misplacing trust, students need to learn the nature of science (NOS) – How does science work? How do scientists reach conclusions? When should we be sceptical about science? (Höttecke & Allchin, 2020). This is not merely about understanding NOS, but is also about the use of such understanding (Allchin, 2011; Ford, 2008). This may include: (1) identifying whether recognition from peer reviewers has been obtained; (2) examining the credentials of those who claim expertise; (3) determining the level of expert consensus; and (4) identifying possible sources of bias (Leung & Cheng, 2021). Developing students’ understanding of NOS as a form of practice, rather than strictly a form of knowledge, has been shown to play a productive role in their evaluation of socioscientific issues (Leung, 2020). This practice-oriented approach to learning NOS was informed by the Apt-AIR framework of epistemic growth (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018), which conceives epistemic growth as increasing competence to successfully achieve epistemic aims. Developing such competence does not only involve the practical abilities of employing reliable epistemic processes and epistemic ideals to achieve epistemic aims, but also entails students’ metacognitive understanding and regulation as well as their motivation-affective disposition to value and pursue epistemic aims. Yet the effect of a practice-oriented approach to learning NOS on students’ growth in epistemic performance in these areas remains underexplored. Contextualized within the Covid-19 pandemic, this qualitative case study examines students’ growth in understanding and caring about placing trust in a lesson unit guided by a practice-oriented approach to NOS. Seventy-three undergraduate students enrolled in a general education course on making sense of socioscientific issues participated in this study. By engaging students in reflecting on their learning experience, reflective journals were used to capture participants’ growth in epistemic performance. Findings revealed: (1) an increased awareness on the need and reasons for laypeople to place informed trust on claims by knowledge others; (2) consideration of a broader range of reliable epistemic processes; (3) increased consciousness about these epistemic processes; and (4) increased concern, inclination and self-efficacy in assigning epistemic trust. Participants expressing increased understanding about reliable epistemic processes often showed appreciation for these processes as well. This suggests an association between participants’ understanding and caring about reliable epistemic processes, offering empirical support to the intertwining of aspects in the Apt-AIR framework.