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Improving secondary school students' epistemic beliefs about physics through dialogic practical work

By Ewonetu Bantie Belay

This study aimed to determine whether dialogic-practical work could improve students' epistemic beliefs about physics. A quasi-experimental pretest and post-test research design was applied on 91 secondary school students. Data was collected using a 30-item epistemic beliefs questionnaire. A statistically significant difference in epistemic beliefs was observed between dialogic-and recipe-based practical workgroups,t (76) = 5.83, p = .001, d = 1.32. This suggests that students who engage in dialogic-practical work develop better knowledge about physics than students who simply follow given recipes. The implementation of dialogic-practical work contributes to the development of students’ epistemic beliefs about physics. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd