Abstract of Keynote Speech

Teaching Critical Reading and Thinking through Epistemic Cognition: A Classroom Based Approach
Ivar Bråten
University of Oslo, Norway

Epistemic cognition concerning sources of knowledge can be defined as attending to, representing, evaluating, and using available or accessible information about the sources of knowledge claims, for example about the author or publisher. This aspect of epistemic cognition has become more important due to the abundance of easily accessible information on almost every issue that characterizes the Internet age. In this talk, I will argue that designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions to promote adaptive epistemic cognition concerning sources of knowledge is a way to promote critical reading and thinking among students and, as such, an important research agenda within personal epistemology. In particular, I will present a recent quasi-experimental study that tested the effects of an intervention designed to teach upper-secondary school students to take sources of knowledge into consideration when selecting, processing, and using information resources to complete particular multiple document literacy tasks. The intervention centered on a contrasting cases approach framed by authentic curriculum-based classroom activities and was implemented over six weeks by teachers who had participated in professional development seminars. The findings demonstrated that students who had participated in the intervention placed more value on sources of knowledge when selecting information resources, invested more time and effort in processing the information resources they selected, and more frequently attributed ideas to their respective sources compared to students who instead had participated in typical classroom activities. These effects were observed on far transfer tasks where students worked with information resources on different topics in different situational contexts for different purposes and were sustained over a period of five and a half weeks.


Keynote Speaker

Prof. Ivar Bråten (Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway)

Ivar Bråten is a professor of educational psychology in the Department of Education at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he is the head of the Critical Reading and Learning Lab (CRALL). Among his research interests are epistemic cognition and multiple document literacy, and he has given a large number of talks around the world on these topics. His publication list totals nearly 350 titles, including 10 authored or edited books and approximately 150 international peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, co-authored with over 60 different scholars from 11 different countries. He currently serves on the editorial review boards of Contemporary Educational Psychology, Discourse Processes, Learning and Individual Differences, Learning and Instruction, Metacognition and Learning, and Reading Research Quarterly. Ivar Bråten is a co-editor of the Handbook of Epistemic Cognition (Routledge, 2016) and the Handbook of Multiple Source Use (Routledge, 2018).