Epistemic beliefs in biology among biology-major university students and high school pupils in Mongolia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5564/lavai.v21i33.4508Keywords:
Epistemic beliefs, Interested in Biology, Gender, Studying levelAbstract
Over the past two decades, a large number of studies have explored students’ discipline-specific epistemic beliefs (including biology), a term broadly defined as learners’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing. In current study, we initially examined the level of epistemic beliefs in biology of biology-majoring university students and high school students of Mongolia. We surveyed four main universities of Mongolia and five public high schools with previously developed questionnaire. A total of 588 participants consisted of 388 high school students and 200 university students were examined. The epistemic beliefs in biology questionnaire consists of four factors, Source, Certainty, Development, and Justification. In addition, we used participants’ gender, studying level, and interested in biology as our variables. We evaluated influences of these variables on students’ epistemic beliefs in biology in this study. We used student’s t-test to compare the means of two groups (e.g., gender, level etc.). Findings from this study suggested that biology-majoring university students tended to have more mature views of epistemic beliefs regarding biology than that high school students had (mean scores: university student was 5.44 and high school student was 4.90; t = 9.52; P > 0.001). Furthermore, there were no differences between university students’ epistemic beliefs in terms of all variables (only male students have more mature view on certainty of biological knowledge). Whereas, the high school students’ gender, studying level and interested in biology were influenced on their view of epistemic beliefs. For instance, the lower-grade students (9th and 10th) have more mature epistemic beliefs regarding biology than higher-grade students (11th and 12th). In conclusion, low level or less mature overall epistemic beliefs in biology for high school students may be linked with the lack of engaging experimental activities and shortage of equipped laboratory resources in the majority part of Mongolian public schools.
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