Teaching Human Behavior and the Social Environment to Enhance Students' Personal Epistemology

Abstract

Current trends in education practices focus on student's personal epistemologies and their development. Two social work educators took specific steps to attempt to enhance the personal epistemologies of the social work students in their courses in human behavior in the social environment. One instructor repeated the trajectory of the reflective judgment model in her lectures, and the other gave a series of assignments that presented students with ill-structured problems to solve. Preliminary qualitative and quantitative data provided support for their subjective judgments that the teaching methods assisted students in moving toward more sophisticated personal epistemology. This article outlines the teaching methods and the data used and the current literature on personal epistemology.