Epistemic beliefs of Norwegian history student teachers: Testing and assessing two measurement instruments

Abstract

Since teachers’ and students’ epistemic beliefs about history are believed to significantly impact teachers’ practices, students’ performance and the ability to think historically of both, investigating such beliefs is important. Following the seminal works of Maggioni and colleagues (Maggioni, 2010; Maggioni et al., 2004; Maggioni et al., 2009), a number of studies have adapted versions of her Beliefs About Learning and Teaching History Questionnaire (BLTHQ) and Beliefs about History Questionnaire (BHQ) to quantitatively evaluate epistemic beliefs in different national contexts (Mierwald et al., 2016; Miguel-Revilla et al., 2017; Namamba & Rao, 2016; Nitsche, 2019; Stoel, Logtenberg, et al., 2017). However, the validity and reliability of these instruments have mostly been found to be problematic (Mierwald & Junius, 2022; Stoel et al., 2022). We have tested two different questionnaires – Maggioni’s BLTHQ and our own adaptation of the BHQ ¬– in separate surveys, on respectively 176 and 324 Norwegian history student teachers. For both questionnaires, our exploratory analysis showed a three-factor solution, supporting King and Kitchener’s (1994) model, and undermining the two-factor solutions found in many former studies. However, despite both questionnaires showing acceptable consistency and fitness, these levels were not optimal, and confirmed the problem of epistemic inconsistency (or ‘wobbling’) revealed by previous studies. These results encourage further qualitative studies to better understand the problem of wobbling, to design better questionnaires to be tested in the future.