Epistemic beliefs about the value of integrating information across multiple documents in history

Individual differences in epistemic dispositions may affect learning from multiple-document inquiry tasks by prompting different students to have different task and activity models. Students with epistemic beliefs that are more appropriate for the required activities may view a multiple-document inquiry task as an exercise in corroboration, seeking coherence, and looking for evidence to support claims, whereas students with less-appropriate epistemic beliefs may see the goal as simply finding the “right” answer verbatim within the documents. This paper describes attempts to develop an assessment for this subset of epistemic beliefs about the value of engaging in integration of evidence when learning from multiple documents in history. Across three experiments, the measure was shown to be reliable and valid. It also uniquely predicted multiple-document comprehension in history above and beyond beliefs about the simplicity and certainty of knowledge, and accounted for differences in prior instruction and experience with document-based questions.