Proceedings of The 7th International Conference on Innovation in Science and Technology
Year: 2020
DOI:
Questionnaire of Personal Epistemology in Children: An Exploratory Mixed Research Method
Zahra Tanha, Parvin Kadivar, Soudeh Rahmani, and Razieh Jalili
ABSTRACT:
The study of the belief of elementary students about the nature of knowledge and knowing has been considered as one of the most effective learning in recent years. The purpose of this study was to construct a personal epistemology questionnaire in Iranian children. The combined (qualitative-quantitative) study method was used for this study. At the qualitative stage, with the formation of focal groups for each grade, interview sessions with students from the third to sixth grades of the elementary school were formed first, and the components of personal epistemology were extracted. In the following, researches on personal epistemology were reviewed and related components were extracted. The extracted components in a Delphi study were examined by the experts. In the second stage of the research, which was done quantitatively, questionnaire questions were designed and investigated by field experiment to examine the factor structure. In analyzing the text of the interview with students in open coding, 25 categories and in axial coding based on the similarity of the subject, five categories were obtained. In addition, the research findings indicated that the factor structure of the questionnaire was fitted with the data, which was done using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.
Keywords: personal epistemology, factor structure, mixed-method.