Epistemological beliefs and conceptions about teaching and learning: Equivalence of measurement and structure across year of study and gender

Epistemological beliefs and conceptions about teaching and learning are developmental in nature. Variations in people’s belief structures of these two constructs are most likely due to their differences in age, education level, and gender. While comparisons across groups of different characteristics had been made in many researches, inadequate attention has been given to explicitly ascertain whether the assumed similarity in the belief structure across samples of varied characteristics indeed existed (e.g. Buehl et al., 2002; Chan & Elliott, 2002, 2004; Conley et al., 2004; Hofer, 2000; Schommer-Aikins et al., 2005). To fill this research gap, this study aims to examine the generalizability of Chan and Elliott’s (2004) epistemological beliefs questionnaire (EBQ) and teaching and learning conceptions questionnaire (TLCQ) to different stages of studying and gender before using them to study developmental progression of epistemological beliefs and teaching and learning conceptions. These two instruments had already been validated by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with satisfactory goodness-of-fit indices and, when measurement equivalence across stage of study and sex are confirmed, they would be very useful in future analysis. Through verification with multi-group CFA approach on 549 Hong Kong Chinese teacher students, the measures for epistemological belief and conception about teaching and learning are shown to be factorially equivalent across year 1 and year 4 groups as well as male and female groups. A comparison of mean score based on this valid measure indicated that year 4 students had significantly weaker belief of authority knowledge and traditional conception of teaching and learning than did year 1 students. Female students had significantly stronger belief of authority knowledge than did their male counterparts. This rigorous method is applicable to further longitudinal and cross-cultural research about epistemological beliefs and other related constructs.