Personal Epistemology: The Psychology of Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing (review)

Personal epistemology is the study of how the individual develops a conception of knowledge and how that individual uses that to understand the world. According to Barbara Hofer in her introduction to Personal Epistemology: The Psychology of Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing (2002), "we need a better understanding" of this process and how it is related to the educational process (p. 4). Personal Epistemology endeavors to do just that through charging its chapter authors to unify our language or clarify our terminology, suggesting improvements in methodological approaches, and making connections between epistemic cognition and other important theoretical constructs.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first section, "Conceptual Models of Personal Epistemology," reviews, critiques, and updates some of the major models of cognitive development that have emerged in the last 30 years, with which higher education and student affairs practitioners and graduate preparation faculty will be largely familiar. William S. Moore gives a reconsideration of the Perry scheme of ethical and intellectual development. While Patricia King and Karen Kitchener, Blythe Clinchy, and Marcia Baxter Magolda, respectively, author chapters reflecting upon and revisiting the theoretical models they have constructed. This section ends with a chapter by Marlene Schommer-Aikins that summarizes and presents her prior and current work in the field of epistemological belief inquiry.

Part Two, "Theoretical and Conceptual Issues," looks at the construct of epistemic cognition and beliefs itself. In their chapter, Deanna Kuhn and Michael Weinstock attempt to better define epistemological thinking and why it is important to consider it in educational practice. Michael Chandler, Darcy Hallett, and Bryan Sokol delve into the contradictory claims regarding the development of personal epistemology across the lifespan. David Hammer and Andrew Elby's chapter continues, seeking to clarify confusion in their chapter on the nature of personal epistemology as a theoretical construct. The final two chapters in this section by Lisa Bendixen, and Jill Fitzgerald and James Cunningham, provide a process model, and basic issues to look for when attempting to assess someone's belief patterns, respectively.

Methodological issues in researching personal epistemology are the focus of the three chapters which constitute Part Three of the book. Phillip Wood and CarolAnne Kardash address general elements in epistemic belief research design and data analysis, exposing some of the flaws in currently available questionnaires used as assessments. Gregory Schraw, Lisa Bendixen, and Michael Dunkle specifically look at the development and validation of the Epistemic Belief Inventory (EBI). Concluding this section, Phillip Wood writes again, along with Karen Kitchener and Laura Jensen, about designing and evaluating a written instrument for the Reflective Judgment Model.

The final section of the book explores perspectives on epistemic beliefs specific to two disciplines from a pedagogical vantage point. The four chapters here discuss the epistemological issues and challenges involved in teaching mathematics (Erik De Corte, Peter Op 't Eynde, and Lieven Verschaffel) and science (Philip Bell and Marcia Linn; Anatasia Elder; and Gaoyin Qian and Junlin Pan, particularly comparing epistemological beliefs between U.S. and Chinese high schoolers).

The concluding chapter by Paul Pintrich discusses future challenges and directions for personal epistemology, both in theory and research. The chapter addresses central issues that the contributing authors engaged throughout the text, arriving at consensus positions for each area, as well as giving voice to dissenting viewpoints that were presented. These central issues represent eight areas: the nature of the construct of personal epistemology; components of a personal epistemology; whether epistemological thinking is domain-general or domain specific; the nature of developmental change; mechanisms of change; relations of personal epistemology to cognition, motivation, and learning; gender and group differences in personal epistemologies; and, methods and measurement in the study of personal epistemologies.

Given the scope of the task, the contributing authors of this volume have capably answered the task as a whole. This is notable considering that there is no other comparable volume in the field that brings together the broad variety of...