Project Description
Our team consists of university tutors in five countries, researchers, teacher educators and 30 lead secondary school teachers (15 humanities and 15 science).
Study 1:
We will test the hypothesis that participating in strategies that are designed to stimulate epistemic curiosity and encourage critical thinking about the nature, application, and communication of knowledge cultivates university students’ intellectual humility (IH).
In one strategy, students in eight universities in England, Scotland and Wales will attend workshops that ask Big Questions and seek to develop a humane ethic for technology. Workshop titles include “Can we cure loneliness?” “What are limits of our understanding of time?” “Where is the boundary between humanity and technology?” and “How can modern foreign languages help engineers to build better AI cars?”
Our previous work drew attention to the potential for entrenched subject compartmentalisation and teaching to the test in schools to have a residual dampening effect on students’ epistemic curiosity after they leave (e.g. see Epistemic Insight: Engaging with Big Questions https://youtu.be/DIctYqZ2Bls).
Starting with Leary’s challenge that education (especially HE) may have opposing effects on intellectual humility (Leary 2018) we aim to discover more about the factors that enhance and inhibit IH, as well as identifying practices and interventions that foster such humility.
Our theory of change is that strategies designed to increase students’ epistemic curiosity and capacities to engage with knowledge domains will help students to identify and overcome, through teaching and self-development, any tendencies towards a dampened sense of epistemic curiosity, overconfidence in the power of their own specialism and closedmindedness about knowledge sharing outside their own specialisms. Strategies will include students (a) attending workshops that bring students from the sciences and humanities together (b) co-creating resources for schools (e.g. zines, animations, drama, research collections and academic posters) and (c) developing students’ appreciation of Open Science practices to share and review research.
Study 2:
Selected resources from study 1 will be professionally produced and shared via our school partnerships with 6000 pupils, age 14-17. We will test our hypothesis that research-informed resources designed to teach epistemic insight give participants a greater understanding and intellectual humility around the complexities of advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
In school systems that ‘teach to the test’ pupils can become overconfident that their ways of thinking about knowledge are working. Lack of over-confidence is an element of intellectual humility (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016). Further pupils who only experience text-book science can become closedminded and/or miss the point in lessons intended to enhance their understanding of knowledge. Lee, Lee & Zeidler (2020, p. 686) report that when student J was given a role in a socioscientific debate, he said, “I am invincible. If I put my argument in the right way, I can beat anyone.”
Our methods for both studies include collating quantitative data (measuring attitudinal shifts) and qualitative data (on the relationship between epistemic curiosity and intellectual humility) designed to inform educational policy and practice. Pre-and post-intervention surveys for participants (university scholars, teachers, HE students and school pupils) will include an adapted IH scale (e.g. Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse 2016). Word frequency of epistemic language in assignments and student self-reflection journals will reveal changes in participants’ epistemic curiosity and capacity for IH at key points in the timeline. Focus groups will inform our understanding of how to create strategies that enable intellectual humility to flourish. References at www.epistemicinsight.com/ih/
References
Lee, H., Lee, H., & Zeidler, D. L. (2020). Examining tensions in the socioscientific issues classroom: Students’ border crossings into a new culture of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 57(5), 672-694.
Leary, M. (2018). The psychology of intellectual humility. John Templeton Foundation, accessed 14 August 2021, https://www.templeton.org/discoveries/intellectual-humility
Krumrei-Mancuso, E. J., & Rouse, S. V. (2016). The development and validation of the comprehensive intellectual humility scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 98(2), 209-221.
The picture from research by the Epistemic Insight Initiative: sample materials
The launch of the Epistemic Insight Initiative in schools and teacher education, ‘Big Questions Day’, filmed by BBC Breakfast :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07blqmv
Billingsley, B., Nassaji, M. Secondary School Students’ Reasoning About Science and Personhood. Sci & Educ (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00199-x
Billingsley, B., Nassaji, M., Fraser, S., & Lawson, F. (2018). A Framework for Teaching Epistemic Insight in schools. Research in Science Education. 48(6), 1115-1131. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-018-9788-6
Billingsley, B., Brock, R., Taber, K. S., & Riga, F. (2016). How Students View the Boundaries Between Their Science and Religious Education Concerning the Origins of Life and the Universe. Science Education, 100(3), 459-482 doi:10.1002/sce.21213 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.21213/pdf