Stimulated recall interviews for describing pragmatic epistemology

Abstract

Students’ epistemologies affect how and what they learn: do they believe physics is a list of equations, or a coherent and sensible description of the physical world? In order to study these epistemologies as part of curricular assessment, we adopt the resources framework, which posits that students have many productive epistemological resources that can be brought to bear as they learn physics. In previous studies, these epistemologies have been either inferred from behavior in learning contexts or probed through surveys or interviews outside of the learning context. We argue that stimulated recall interviews provide a contextually and interpretively valid method to access students’ epistemologies that complement existing methods. We develop a stimulated recall interview methodology to assess a curricular intervention and find evidence that epistemological resources aptly describe student epistemologies.