Incorporating Task and Context into the Framing of Personal Epistemologies ’ Portraits

This study reports the development and testing of a context-specific measure of epistemic beliefs related to text-based inquiry, the 41-item Beliefs About Inquiry Questionnaire (BAIQ). Undergraduates (n=240) completed the BAIQ twice, first thinking about inquiry tasks related to school and second thinking about tasks related to their personal purposes. Both the school and personal scales had high reliability ( =.85). Mean scores in the two contexts were highly correlated (r =.78), although students tended to have better mean scores for school, while certain items appeared problematic for the personal context. Overall epistemic competence was not high. We suggest that schooling can contribute to the development of epistemic competence, but there is still much space for fostering epistemic growth in school