Epistemic Justification in Multiple Document Literacy: A Refutation Text Intervention

Epistemic justification concerns people’s beliefs and thinking about the justification of knowledge claims. Such beliefs and thinking have been linked to students’ academic achievement, including their performance on multiple document literacy tasks, which involve the selection, evaluation, processing, and use of multiple documents to construct and communicate a coherent understanding of a topic, issue, or phenomenon. Few
researchers have tried to influence students’ epistemic justifications experimentally, however, and no prior study has investigated the effects of an experimental intervention targeting epistemic justification on a broad array of multiple document literacy tasks. The main aim of the current study was to fill this gap in the literature by designing an intervention to influence teacher students’ reliance on personal justification, justification by authority, and justification by multiple sources, respectively, and examining the effects of this intervention on their beliefs about the justification of knowledge claims, as well as on their selection of
documents, justifications for document selections, processing of selected documents, and use of selected documents when performing an authentic multiple document task on a controversial educational issue. Preliminary findings from this intervention study will be presented in the seminar.
Short bio: Ivar Bråten is a professor of educational psychology in the Faculty of Educational Sciences 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 well over 300 titles, including 11 authored or edited books and more than 160  international peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, co-authored with over 80 different scholars from 13 different countries. He currently serves on the editorial review boards of Contemporary Educational Psychology, Discourse Processes, Educational Psychology Review, Journal of Educational Psychology, Learning and Individual Differences, Learning and Instruction, Metacognition and Learning, and Reading Research Quarterly. Ivar is a co-editor of the Handbook of Epistemic Cognition (Routledge, 2016) and the Handbook of Multiple Source Use (Routledge, 2018).