The Development of Epistemological Understanding Revisited: Enhancing Reliability of the Tool by Using Only Abstract Items

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the process of modification of the research tool designed for measuring the development of personal epistemology— Standardized Epistemological Understanding Assessment (SEUA). SEUA was constructed as an improved version of the instrument initially proposed by Kuhn et al. SEUA was proved to be a more reliable instrument than its predecessor; however, further changes were necessary to obtain better reliability and easier to administer form. During further research, we observed that test items used in this tool could be divided into abstract and concrete, which were approached differently by a subset of our participants. In their cases, the inability to suppress personal preferences in responding to concrete items threatened the tool’s validity, as the instrument may measure preferences rather than epistemological beliefs in this situation. SEUA was therefore modified to create a full-abstract version (SEUA-A). Both versions were administered in an online form. The performance of two versions of the tool was compared. The study results allow us to conclude that our online SEUA-A, which consists of only abstract items, is the most reliable version of the tool.