In this article, we describe the origins, elaboration, and refinement of two interconnected theoretical frameworks related to epistemic thinking: the AIR framework (Chinn et al., 2014) and the Apt-AIR framework (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018). In accordance with the purposes of this special collection, as we discuss the development of these theoretical frameworks, we simultaneously reflect on processes of theory development in light of Greene’s (2022) focal paper on theory development in educational psychology. We organize this article in terms of seven reflections on theory development for educational research. Each reflection is illustrated with examples from the development of the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks. We begin with a brief introduction to the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks to provide a backdrop for our seven reflections.

Overview of the AIR and Apt-AIR Frameworks

One of the important goals of education is nurturing learners’ epistemic thinking. By epistemic thinking, we refer broadly to thinking related to knowledge and knowing (Barzilai & Zohar, 2014). Further, we construe knowledge and knowing broadly to include a variety of aims related to developing representations of the natural and social worlds, including explanations, understandings, models, and beliefs held to be accurate (Chinn et al., 2011). Many other terms have been used to refer to elements of what we call epistemic thinking, including personal epistemology (e.g., Hofer & Pintrich, 2002; Muis et al., 2018), epistemological or epistemic beliefs (e.g., Buehl & Alexander, 2001; Muis, 2007; Schommer, 1990), epistemic cognition (e.g., Chinn et al., 2011; Greene et al., 2016), and epistemological resources (e.g., Louca et al., 2004).

We distinguish between epistemic thinking and epistemic education, which we define as deliberate efforts to promote learners’ epistemic growth—or growth in epistemic thinking (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018). Epistemic education encompasses all the instructional approaches—formal and informal—designed to promote growth in learners’ ways of knowing. Epistemic education shares some goals with other educational approaches such as fostering critical thinking (Ennis, 1987), but it addresses a wider range of thinking practices—not only critical evaluation of information and arguments but also more general inquiry processes, model development, historical interpretation, and so on. Epistemic education also typically emphasizes the metacognitive aspects of epistemic thinking more fully than critical thinking approaches by highlighting learners’ understandings of the nature of knowledge and knowing. Of course, promoting epistemic growth is not the only goal of education; education has other important goals such as civic, social, cultural, emotional, and health-related goals. Yet, epistemic growth is at the core of learners’ intellectual development.

The AIR framework characterizes epistemic thinking in terms of three interdependent components, specifically, epistemic Aims and their value, epistemic Ideals, and Reliable epistemic processes. Epistemic aims are goals involving developing a representation of the world, such as models, theories, explanations, and beliefs. The value or importance of epistemic aims can impact whether and how people make the effort to achieve them. For example, the epistemic aim of discovering cures for cancer has high personal and societal value, which can motivate researchers to study the causes and treatment of cancer. In contrast, when epistemic aims have low personal or social value, people might not devote sufficient time and effort to pursuing them. The value of epistemic aims can be derived from practical or nonepistemic aims, such as promoting people’s health or increasing social justice. Epistemic aims can also be valuable in and of themselves.

Epistemic ideals are the standards or criteria that people use to evaluate whether epistemic aims have been achieved and the quality of the resulting representations. For example, scientists evaluate scientific explanations using ideals such as empirical adequacy, which is the degree to which explanations account for the available evidence, or fruitfulness, which is the degree to which explanations point to new directions for research (Kuhn, 1977; Longino, 1996).

Finally, reliable epistemic processes are the individual and collective strategies or methods that people use to try to achieve their epistemic aims in light of the associated ideals. Processes are reliable when they have a good likelihood of success. Some of these processes are performed by people on their own, such as when a person evaluates scientific claims by taking steps to check the credentials of the sources making those claims (Stadtler & Bromme, 2014). Other processes are collective, such as engaging in group argumentation to find a better answer than a single person can arrive at alone (Goldman, 1999; Mercier et al., 2016).

Table 1 presents selected, not exhaustive, examples of aims, ideals, and reliable processes that were suggested and used by students in two of our projects. In the first project, ninth graders constructed knowledge from multiple historical documents in a documents-based inquiry unit. In the second, seventh graders engaged in constructing and evaluating scientific models based on evidence that they gathered themselves or read about. The table illustrates the range and variety of aims, ideals, and processes that students can use in different kinds of tasks. The particular aims, ideals, and processes will often vary contextually by task.

Table 1 Examples of students’ epistemic aims, ideals, and processes
Full size table

As highlighted in Fig. 1, epistemic aims, ideals, and reliable processes are inextricably interconnected in the AIR framework. When people set an aim, how do they evaluate whether they achieved their aim? They determine whether the ideals associated with their aim have been met, ideals such as fit with evidence and being understandable. Aims and ideals can also guide the selection and enactment of the processes people use to achieve their aims. A person who believes that good scientific conclusions should fit the evidence will use processes such as conducting online searches to locate relevant empirical studies. Thus, people deploy aims, ideals, and reliable processes in concert when engaged in epistemic thinking. The interdependence of the AIR components does not mean, however, that researchers must always study all three together. Researchers might, for example, focus only on learners’ ideals, aware that learners are also adopting aims and reliable processes, even though these are not spotlighted in this particular study (e.g., Pluta et al., 2011). This can be justified when the researchers want to provide a rich and detailed portrait of one of these components, each of which can be complex in its own right.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The AIR framework: interdependence of epistemic aims, epistemic ideals, and reliable epistemic processes

Full size image

Because AIR explains how aims, ideals, and reliable processes interact as people engage with epistemic tasks, we have referred to it as a “model” in previous publications. But AIR can also be termed a theoretical framework, in that it provides a structure for analyzing epistemic thinking. In the present paper, we refer to AIR as a framework to highlight the continuities between the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks.

The Apt-AIR framework was developed expressly to address a normative question: What should the goals of epistemic education be? This is the perennial educational question of what is worth teaching and why. Designed to answer this question, the framework is grounded in the reliabilist virtue epistemology of the philosopher Ernest Sosa (2011, 2015, 2017). Sosa’s influential proposal was that an epistemic performance (such as forming a belief) can be evaluated by examining three conditions: (a) its success in attaining its aim (e.g., the belief is accurate or true); (b) if it is an exercise of competence (e.g., appropriate strategies such as seeking multiple perspectives, evaluating source trustworthiness, and corroborating information were used when forming the belief); and (c) if the performance is apt, that is, if it is successful because it is competent (e.g., the accurate belief was formed through the proper use of these strategies). Real achievement, according to Sosa, requires not just success but apt success, because competent performance reduces the risk of failure. Apt performance is even more assured if it is guided by meta-level awareness of one’s competence to perform in various conditions, as when the person is aware of whether she has enough corroborated information to make a judgment at all. Performance that is guided by such reflective awareness is described by Sosa as fully apt performance. Table 2 includes examples of how Sosa’s analysis might apply to various epistemic performances. Following Sosa, we have argued that the aim of epistemic education should be to promote learners’ fully apt epistemic performance. For further explanations and details, see Barzilai and Chinn (2018).

Table 2 Successful, competent, apt, and fully apt epistemic performance
Full size table

Thus, at the heart of the Apt-AIR framework is the goal of promoting learners’ fully apt epistemic performance. But this goal is still quite general and abstract. A practical analysis of the goals of epistemic education needs to be more specific. Accordingly, we unpacked apt epistemic performance in terms of analyses of learners’ engagement with epistemic aims, ideals, and reliable processes (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018). Thus, the Apt-AIR framework incorporates and extends the AIR framework. More specifically, we proposed that fully apt epistemic performance is facilitated by five interwoven aspects of competent engagement with aims, ideals, and reliable processes. The aspects are summarized in Table 3. In brief, the first important aspect is active cognitive engagement with valuable epistemic ideals and processes to achieve valuable aims. Second, engagement should be adaptive because the aims, ideals, and reliable processes that are used should be appropriate to the particulars of tasks and settings and must thus be varied appropriately across contexts. Third, fully apt epistemic performance requires metacognitive understanding of the meaning of epistemic aims, ideals, and processes as well as the conditions under which they are applicable, together with the metacognitive regulatory skills needed to guide cognitive engagement with them. The fourth aspect of engagement is caring about and enjoying engagement with appropriate aims and ideals and reliable processes; people must be sufficiently motivated and affectively engaged to use valuable aims, ideals, and processes. The fifth aspect is engaging in epistemic performance together with others, which means that people need to be able to achieve epistemic aims jointly in varied social settings and to understand the social nature of knowledge production. The heuristic value of unpacking these aspects is to identify important aspects of epistemic performance that require instructional support to help students achieve fully apt epistemic performance. Greater detail regarding each aspect can be found in Barzilai and Chinn (2018). Apt-AIR was referred to as a “framework” because it provides a structure for developing normative analyses of apt epistemic performance that can guide the design of educational goals and activities.

Table 3 The Apt-AIR framework: five aspects of epistemic performance
Full size table

It is important to keep in mind that in the Apt-AIR framework, the aspects of epistemic performance cannot be disconnected from aims, ideals, and reliable processes. Indeed, the aspects are expressly defined in terms of engagement with aims, ideals, and reliable processes. It is also important to note that the aspects are interrelated and are not independent or mutually exclusive dimensions. Many activities that learners can engage in involve multiple intersecting aspects. For instance, learners can cognitively examine if a claim is correct during social interaction while engaging in shared metacognitive regulation. Finally, the order in which these aspects are presented does not reflect their importance or temporal sequence. We decided on this order mainly for rhetorical reasons, and the aspects could very well be ordered differently. Having described the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks, we next turn to seven reflections on how they developed.

Reflection 1. Motivation to Address Meaningful Educational Challenges

One important driver of the development of educational theories is the need to address meaningful educational challenges. Educational theories do not only explain phenomena. They also identify important educational problems or hard-to-achieve educational goals and provide the theoretical means to address them. If the elements of the theory can inform curriculum design and instruction, then this can serve as an additional virtue of the theory.

The AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks are both motivated substantially by the goal of addressing complex yet important educational challenges in instructionally relevant ways. Both of us have been motivated by a desire to support learners in reasoning about issues encountered in the real world. For Barzilai, a prominent motivator was to develop conceptualizations of epistemic thinking that can support growth in inquiry with multiple information sources about current and historical real-world issues (e.g., Barzilai et al., 2020; Mor-Hagani & Barzilai, 2022). For Chinn, a prominent motivator was to develop an analysis that could support learning environments promoting model-based inquiry in science (e.g., Chinn et al., 2018, 2023).

The frameworks were conceived in the context of two psychological approaches to epistemic thinking that were prevalent at the time. The first approach sought to describe development in epistemic thinking (King & Kitchener, 1994; Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002; Perry, 1968/1999). For example, in the widely used model of Kuhn and Weinstock (2002), an early-developing position is the absolutist position; according to this position, if people differ in their ideas, then one idea will be right, and others will be wrong. The next position is multiplism; according to this view, knowledge is mere opinion, with all opinions equally right or wrong, and choice among these opinions is overwhelmingly subjective. Finally, the evaluativist position involves a recognition that multiple ideas can be correct on an issue, yet some ideas may be better supported by arguments and evidence than others. More recent work using the developmental approach has abandoned the assumption of strict temporal phases. Instead, people may adopt different perspectives on different topics, and they can be high or low on multiple perspectives. For instance, they can score high on both evaluativism and multiplism, though typically one perspective will be more dominant (Barzilai & Weinstock, 2015). Endorsement of the evaluativist perspective is associated with better performance on tasks such as integrating information from conflicting viewpoints and sources (Barzilai & Eshet-Alkalai, 2015; Iordanou et al., 2020; Mason et al., 2006; Weinstock, 2016).

The second prevalent psychological approach characterized epistemic thinking as a set of epistemic beliefs about dimensions of knowledge and knowing (Buehl & Alexander, 2001; Schommer, 1990). Hofer and Pintrich (1997) developed a widely-used model that specified four continua of beliefs. The first two were beliefs about the nature of knowledge: (a) beliefs about the uncertainty or certainty of knowledge and (b) beliefs about the complexity or simplicity of knowledge. The second two beliefs were about the processes of knowing: (c) beliefs about the sources of knowledge, such as personal experience, authority, or inquiry; and (d) beliefs about the justification of knowledge, such as justification based on authority, on what feels right, or on rules of inquiry and integration of expert opinion. In a meta-analysis, Greene et al. (2018) found generally small correlations between measures of epistemic beliefs and academic achievement.

As we worked on problems of epistemic thinking, it seemed to each of us that although these two prevalent frameworks were highly valuable, they were insufficient for addressing the educational problems that most interested us. One main issue was that these frameworks described epistemic thinking as a set of broad beliefs or perspectives, which did not seem to adequately capture the practical and situated aspects of epistemic thinking (Louca et al., 2004; Rosenberg et al., 2006; Sandoval, 2005). For example, although adopting an evaluativist stance seemed important, this fell short of fully explaining learners’ performance: In our studies, we found that it also mattered which particular criteria or strategies learners were using as they engaged in inquiry and how well these were adapted to their tasks (Barzilai & Zohar, 2012; Pluta et al., 2011). For instance, to promote critical evaluation of online sources, it seemed vital to figure out which evaluation criteria (e.g., author expertise or content relevance) and strategies (e.g., evaluating sources or contents) learners were using.

Another issue was that the description of the ends of epistemic growth in these frameworks seemed incomplete. Both frameworks posited a fixed developmental end goal—namely, developing an evaluativist perspective or developing beliefs that knowledge is uncertain, complex, and based on one’s inquiry into the evidence. However, these goals did not always seem normatively appropriate. For example, in science inquiry learning, it seemed inappropriate to teach students that all knowledge is highly uncertain. Some knowledge is certain beyond reasonable doubt, such as knowledge that “the heart circulates blood through the body” (Elby & Hammer, 2001, p. 557). Likewise in online inquiry, in environments rife with unreliable information, learners need to appreciate that some information is definitely false; in encounters with misinformation online, adopting an absolutist stance is sometimes well-justified. Furthermore, on many topics, learners and laypersons cannot evaluate and synthesize all the relevant evidence sufficiently well on their own, because doing so requires highly specialized knowledge, so that they may instead need to rely on the trustworthy testimony of knowledgeable others, such as teachers, professionals, scientists, and other experts (Bråten et al., 2011; Bromme & Goldman, 2014; Chinn & Duncan, 2018). Yet epistemic beliefs frameworks characterized reliance on epistemic authorities, such as experts, as less sophisticated or productive. Thus, existing conceptualizations captured some important dimensions of epistemic thinking but seemed incomplete as a description of the ends of epistemic growth for learners and laypeople.

Accordingly, a major goal of the AIR framework was to provide a more nuanced and finer-grained descriptive account of learners’ epistemic thinking that could better explain their performance across a variety of important tasks such as inquiry, argumentation, and fact-checking. An equally important goal was to provide an account of epistemic thinking that could be leveraged instructionally to promote learners’ epistemic growth as they engaged in these tasks. For example, as we discuss later (“Reflection 4”), ideals are instructionally potent, because they can be taught to students, and students can also develop and apply productive ideals on their own, as illustrated in Table 1 (Barzilai et al., 2020; Barzilai, Tal-Savir, Chinn, et al., 2023; Chinn et al., 2018).

Throughout our work on these frameworks, our intent has always been to find ways to better address the elements of epistemic thinking that are needed for people to think well in the world. Drawing on AIR, we wanted students to learn the particular ideals and processes that will help them achieve valuable epistemic ends such as evaluating online claims and developing well-justified arguments. Apt-AIR expands the AIR analysis by considering more fully what learners need to be able to do with these aims, ideals, and processes. By targeting engagement with particular aims, ideals, and reliable processes that students can learn, we sought to develop more instructionally useful frameworks. Because the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks aim to address the full range of learners’ epistemic performance across diverse intellectual tasks, they are also more complex than previous frameworks of epistemic thinking. However, we believe that this complexity authentically reflects the fundamental complexity of epistemic performance, which has been underplayed by previous frameworks. Further, the frameworks provide a more flexible account of epistemic thinking and performance that can apply to a broader range of educational challenges and contexts.

In sum, a main motivator for educational theorizing can be to develop theories that can address important educational challenges. The goal of educational theories is usually not only to describe how people learn, think, feel, or interact. Educational theories can also provide a vision of how education can better support the growth and flourishing of people, groups, and society as a whole. For us, the pursuit of this vision has impelled us to think through, and then repeatedly rethink, our conceptualizations.

Reflection 2. Infusing Philosophical Insights Into Education Theories

Some arenas of educational theorizing have close conceptual ties to philosophical scholarship—such as theories of the development of morality, connected to ethics (e.g., Wren, 2014); theories of civic learning, connected to political philosophy (e.g., Parker, 2014); and theories of epistemic thinking, connected to epistemology (e.g., Chinn & Rinehart, 2016). A main source of insights and findings on epistemic thinking is the work of philosophers who have long studied knowledge and knowing. These include epistemologists, philosophers of science, and philosophers of history (Chinn & Rinehart, 2016; Duschl & Grandy, 2008).

Although we are not philosophers, both of us have had a long-standing interest in philosophy and how it can inform our educational work. We have studied philosophy, regularly read philosophical books and papers, and discussed our work with philosophers. Because of the immediate relevance of philosophy for research on epistemic thinking, we have consistently sought to weave valuable insights from philosophy into our theories of epistemic thinking and epistemic education, including the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks.

With the AIR framework, a primary concern that drove its development was that psychological and educational work on epistemic thinking seemed to be inconsistent with work in epistemology and the philosophy of science, in ways that seemed to have important educational implications. In a paper presaging the AIR framework, Chinn et al. (2011) argued that many issues addressed by philosophers were absent in educational theories of epistemic thinking. One of these issues was epistemic aims. If a student sets a goal to gain knowledge on a topic, this—by definition—must be an epistemic aim. Yet epistemic aims were not explicitly included in previous models of epistemic thinking. Epistemologists have explored a variety of epistemic aims—such as knowledge, true belief, avoidance of false beliefs, understanding, and models (Elgin, 2017; Kvanvig, 2003). Further, some educational studies had empirically demonstrated the importance of how students construe the epistemic aims or goals of their tasks. For example, adopting a sensemaking goal can lead learners to shift from mechanically retrieving information to building a causal explanation (Rosenberg et al., 2006). Thus, it seemed important to examine exactly what people’s epistemic aims are.

A second issue that was recurrent in much philosophical work was a concern with the criteria or ideals used to evaluate theories and knowledge. For example, philosophers of science have discussed criteria for theory evaluation such as empirical adequacy, parsimony, and heterogeneity (Kuhn, 1977; Longino, 1996). Some epistemologists have advanced coherence as a core criterion of knowledge; that is, to count as knowledge, beliefs must fit into a coherent interlocking network of beliefs (e.g., BonJour, 1985). Although criteria had been used in some areas of education, such as proposals for evaluating arguments using criteria like the number and quality of reasons (Means & Voss, 1996), theorists of epistemic thinking did not incorporate criteria explicitly into their models.

A third philosophical issue involved reliable processes (Bishop & Trout, 2005; Goldman, 1986), which were emphasized in some epistemological theories but not in contemporary psychological models. Reliabilist epistemologies view beliefs as justified if they are produced by reliable belief-forming processes (Goldman, 1986). For example, at the individual level, everyday beliefs formed through visual perception are usually reliable, because visual perception yields accurate knowledge under the right conditions, such as good lighting and close-enough distances. At the social level, social critique is a reliable social process for developing knowledge (Goldman, 1999) under proper conditions including the diversity of the community, its openness to new ideas, and its uptake of critique (Longino, 1990; Oreskes, 2019). These reliabilist ideas had no role in theories of epistemic thinking at the time, although they were starting to be addressed in research that took a more situated, practical approach to epistemic thinking (e.g., Barzilai & Zohar, 2012; Sandoval, 2005).

The AIR framework, as outlined by Chinn et al. (2014) and Chinn and Rinehart (2016), addressed these philosophical issues and incorporated the insights of philosophers by explicitly embedding aims, ideals, and reliable processes into a framework of epistemic thinking. The overall process of theory development was thus the use of philosophical conceptions to rethink what the main components of epistemic thinking should include. (See Chinn et al., 2011, and Chinn & Rinehart, 2016, for further discussions of philosophical issues.)

In developing the Apt-AIR framework, we continued our efforts to infuse philosophical insights into educational frameworks. As we considered how best to prepare students to think well, it seemed likely that philosophers’ ideas about norms for good thinking would be pertinent. Accordingly, we searched in philosophical literatures to identify perspectives that could inform an account of the goals of epistemic education that could better address current educational challenges. Sosa’s (2011, 2015, 2017) analysis of fully apt epistemic performance—as described earlier—was particularly compelling because it helped us address a vexing problem, that what counts as good epistemic performance can be task- and situation-dependent and requires metacognitive judgment. For example, in the case of online inquiry, people may sometimes aim to tell right from wrong, whereas at other times they may aim to understand multiple legitimate viewpoints. Thus, they need to set their goals adaptively while considering topic complexity, how much they know about the topic, and more (Bromme et al., 2010). The construct of fully apt epistemic performance helped us conceptualize epistemic goals in terms of competent success across diverse tasks that are relevant to twenty-first-century learners (Barzilai & Chinn, 2019).

We also considered implications of philosophical work for how to characterize epistemic growth. Previous approaches to epistemic thinking mainly construed epistemic growth as change in what learners know and believe about knowledge and knowing. Yet much philosophical work has described cognitive and social activities of knowledge construction and evaluation (Bishop & Trout, 2005; Goldman, 1986, 1999; Latour, 1999). Philosophers have also noted the importance of epistemic motivations and emotions that can inspire people to pursue epistemic goals (Baehr, 2021; Zagzebski, 1996). Thus, philosophical research suggested that there are important cognitive, social, and dispositional aspects of epistemic performance, as well, and this influenced how we conceptualized the five aspects of the Apt-AIR framework.

As discussed in this section, an important catalyst of theory development can be the effort to rethink assumptions of educational theories using insights from philosophy. This can be valuable when philosophy addresses issues that are of interest to educators, as is the case with epistemology. Philosophical discussions can provide a basis for reevaluating current educational assumptions (Alexander, 2003; P. Murphy et al., 2024) and can also point to unexplored topics that merit educators’ attention. More generally, new educational theories can sometimes emerge through long-term conversations with theoretical frameworks from other disciplines.

Reflection 3. Increasing Coherence Among Educational Psychology Theories

Educational psychology theories often develop as disconnected islands in which distinct terminologies and assumptions can flourish uninterrupted. Understandably, these theories are typically developed to address particular phenomena or processes, which can require a high degree of specification. However, learning is a holistic phenomenon (Alexander et al., 2009), and to the extent that these theories are valid, they must meet somewhere. Increasing coherence and integration among educational psychology theories can bolster their validity, reliability, and practical utility (Greene, 2022). Further, following the fine threads that connect theories can lead to novel theoretical insights and help increase theoretical clarity.

The development of the Apt-AIR framework involved extensive integrative work with multiple theories from education and psychology, as well as with philosophical theories as described in the previous section. In particular, each of the aspects of the Apt-AIR framework is extensively interwoven with one or more theories within education and/or psychology. In developing this framework, our goal has been to bring the conceptualization of epistemic performance into increasing alignment with core ideas from research on cognition, metacognition, motivation, collaborative learning, and other areas.

A case in point is the relations between models of epistemic thinking and metacognition. Although the relationships between these models had been noted by multiple researchers (e.g., Hofer, 2004; Kitchener, 1983; Kuhn, 2001; Muis, 2007; Perry, 1968/1999), these models mostly developed in distinct niches. The metacognitive dimensions of epistemic thinking were unelaborated, and its cognitive dimensions were often ignored. As researchers who were deeply interested in both epistemic thinking and metacognition, Barzilai and Zohar were perplexed by this state of affairs. This theoretical unease led to a series of papers in which they explored the interconnections of epistemic thinking and metacognition in an attempt to increase coherence and alignment between these areas of research (Barzilai & Zohar, 2012, 2014, 2016). This line of work grappled with fundamental questions such as to what extent is epistemic thinking metacognitive and what are the metacognitive facets of epistemic thinking. A strong meta-theoretical assumption guiding this work was that it would make little sense to assume that models of epistemic thinking are disconnected from metacognitive models. Rather, a parsimonious analysis requires situating epistemic thinking within existing theoretical models of the meta/cognitive system and exploring the ensuing implications.

The resulting Multifaceted Framework of Epistemic Thinking (Barzilai & Zohar, 2014, 2016) defined the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of epistemic thinking in ways that were aligned with central models of metacognition and that also provided useful theoretical expansions of the construct of epistemic thinking. For example, following Flavell (1979), the cognitive aspects of epistemic thinking were defined as those aspects that are used to make cognitive progress, including thinking about the epistemic status and properties of specific information, knowledge claims, and sources and engaging in processes and strategies for reasoning about these, such as evaluating the validity of a claim on social media or the trustworthiness of a particular website. In contrast, the metacognitive aspects were defined as knowledge, skills, and experiences related to the nature of knowledge and of knowing, such as knowledge about criteria and strategies for evaluating claims or sources (for detailed definitions and examples, see Barzilai & Zohar, 2014, 2016). The Multifaceted Framework has informed research on self-regulated learning (Muis & Singh, 2018) and was, along with the AIR framework, central to the development of the Apt-AIR framework.

As mentioned, the goal of the Apt-AIR framework was to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the important aspects of learners’ epistemic performance that educators should pay attention to. To develop the Apt-AIR framework, we built upon the Multifaceted Framework (Barzilai & Zohar, 2014, 2016) in order to analyze the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of engagement with epistemic aims, ideals, and processes (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018). For example, we defined cognitive engagement in epistemic performance as actively using and applying epistemic ideals and processes to achieve specific epistemic aims, such as determining the veracity of online knowledge claims or generating reliable explanations. We defined metacognitive engagement with epistemic aims, ideals, and processes as regulating and understanding these components. Regulation of epistemic performance can include individual and shared planning, monitoring, and evaluation of strategies and products (Barzilai & Zohar, 2014, 2016; Greene, 2018). For example, learners might decide to evaluate alternative models, track their progress toward choosing the best model, and then reflect on the success of their plan (Lobczowski et al., 2020). Metacognitive understanding of epistemic performance involves understanding the meaning, value, and uses of epistemic aims, ideals, and processes, such as understanding the characteristics of good models, knowing why they are important, and knowing how to evaluate model quality.

We were also well aware that studies had repeatedly demonstrated that epistemic thinking depends strongly on the particulars of disciplines, topics, and tasks (e.g., Bromme et al., 2010; Elby & Hammer, 2001; Muis et al., 2006). Hence, we conceived the application, regulation, and understanding of epistemic aims, ideals, and processes as highly adaptive and included that as a core aspect of apt epistemic performance. For example, the aims, ideals, and processes of evaluating sources differ in history, in science, and in everyday evaluation as laypersons seek information online. In this way, our framework was informed by various situative theories (e.g., Louca et al., 2004; Sandoval, 2005).

Further, the “warming trend” in educational psychology revealed that cognition is inextricably entangled with learners’ emotions and motivations (Sinatra, 2005). Epistemic thinking, too, had been found to be shaped by learners’ motivations and emotions (Barzilai & Zohar, 2014; Muis et al., 2018; Sinatra et al., 2014). Informed by this work, we conceived epistemic performance as guided by learners’ dispositions to care about epistemic aims, ideals, and processes for attaining knowledge and understanding. Epistemic performance is also supported by positive epistemic emotions such as curiosity and enjoyment (Muis et al., 2018), by affectively engaged stances that are guided by interest (List & Alexander, 2017), and by a willingness to tolerate the frustration that might arise when answers are not found right away.

Finally, the Apt-AIR framework was also informed by research on collaborative and community learning and reasoning (e.g., Berland et al., 2016; Cobb et al., 2001; Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017; Ryu & Sandoval, 2012). Research in these areas has demonstrated that epistemic thinking is deeply social. For instance, learners adopt norms for justifying arguments from their teachers and each other (Ryu & Sandoval, 2012) and can engage in meta-talk about the quality of their arguments (Kuhn et al., 2013). They also evaluate the knowledge production of other social groups, such as the knowledge produced by economists or scientists (Hendriks et al., 2020). Sometimes these social epistemic processes can be inequitable and unjust, such as when students are deprived of opportunities to engage in inquiry and higher-order thinking (Zohar et al., 2001) or when people’s testimony is accorded lower trustworthiness due to their gender or ethnicity (Fricker, 2007). Therefore, we argued that an important social aspect of epistemic performance is becoming aware of forms of epistemic injustice and developing commitments to pursuing increasingly just practices.

In these ways, the Apt-AIR framework (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018) synthesized theoretical insights stemming from diverse areas—including metacognition, motivation, and collaborative learning—to identify the five key aspects of epistemic performance summarized in Table 3. This analysis represents our attempts to integrate a broad diversity of scholarship into an integrative, coherent framework that describes the key aspects of epistemic performance and that could guide curriculum planning and design. By drawing on a broad array of scholarship, we hoped to develop a robust framework of epistemic thinking that could bridge hitherto unconnected areas of research and open up new paths for inquiry and development.

Reflection 4. The Role of Design in Theory Development

As Greene (2022) noted, theories can have both descriptive uses (e.g., portraying, conceptualizing, and analyzing phenomena) and explanatory uses (e.g., identifying why phenomena happen and making predictions). Educational theories, we argue, have a particular explanatory value: They can explain why some forms of learning may be more productive than others, and they can explain and predict why some forms of instruction might lead to better outcomes. The ultimate value of an educational theory, in our view, lies in the extent to which it can inform the design of curricula, instruction, and learning environments that support learners’ and teachers’ growth. Yet the relations between theory development and design are bidirectional: Theory-informed design can provide important insights that, in turn, support the theory or lead to its refinement.

The Apt-AIR framework was intended from the outset to provide an analysis of epistemic performance that could serve as a road map for productive design of curricula, instruction, and learning environments. Thus, our interest in developing this framework was both theoretical and practical: We sought a well-justified conception of the goals of epistemic growth in educational contexts that could guide the design of curricula, learning environments, and instruction for supporting epistemic growth. We hoped that through considering the intersections of epistemic, aims, ideals, and processes with the five aspects of epistemic performance, researchers and educators could identify important facets of epistemic growth that they might not have noticed previously and then plan instruction to support more robust epistemic growth. These goals led, for example, to the inclusion of tables in our 2018 article that demonstrate how the framework can be applied in various learning contexts and the inclusion of a case study illustrating how teachers might promote epistemic performance by attending to all five aspects through their activities and discourse (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018).

We envisioned that using the Apt-AIR framework as a road map for design could begin with discerning valuable epistemic aims that are worth achieving and that are amenable to instruction. The next steps would be articulating what successful outcomes are and characterizing the competent performance that is likely to result in successful outcomes. For example, the aim of creating resistance to common forms of online misinformation might be partially achieved by teaching students to identify recurring forms of misleading or manipulative communication (Lewandowsky & van der Linden, 2021). However, if the aim is to enable students to judge the accuracy of diverse types of accurate and inaccurate online claims, then a broader set of strategies is needed, including strategies such as sourcing, scrutinizing evidence, and corroboration (Barzilai et al., 2023a; Bråten et al., 2018; Wineburg et al., 2022).

After characterizing competent performance, additional work is required to translate these ideas into the design of curricula, learning environments, and instruction across various contexts and educational levels. This work involves developing a layer of design principles or design conjectures that bridge between the high-level theoretical assumptions and the design of learning environments, tasks, activities, scaffolds, and discourse prompts that can support epistemic growth (Kali, 2021; Sandoval, 2014). For example, a key design principle for supporting growth in metacognitive understanding of epistemic performance (aspect 3 of Apt-AIR; Barzilai & Chinn, 2018) is creating opportunities for learners and teachers to collaboratively notice, articulate, elaborate, and evaluate epistemic ideals and processes. We have created such opportunities in a variety of ways—for example, by encouraging middle school students to develop and refine their own class lists of criteria for evaluating models, arguments, or sources (Barzilai, Tal-Savir, Chinn, et al., 2023c; Chinn et al., 2018) and by prompting students to evaluate source trustworthiness and discuss their justifications for their judgments (Barzilai et al., 2020). As another example, to foster caring about epistemic performance (aspect 4 of Apt-AIR; Barzilai & Chinn, 2018), our key design principle has been to support students’ autonomy and agency as they collaboratively work on meaningful and interesting challenges (cf. Ryan & Deci, 2020); students appeared unlikely to care about aims, ideals, and processes unless they had some agency in choosing and/or applying them (Barzilai & Chinn, 2019; Chinn et al., 2018).

Other researchers have also explored innovative approaches for facilitating and supporting learners’ and teachers’ engagement with epistemic ideals and processes in various disciplinary and instructional contexts, from elementary school to teacher education (e.g., Cottone et al., 2023; Leung, 2020; Lunn Brownlee et al., 2022). For example, Leung (2020) promoted undergraduates’ adoption of reliable epistemic processes for evaluating socio-scientific issues in the media by engaging students in hands-on evaluation of science news across diverse issues, supporting metacognitive reflection on their evaluations, and developing shared lists of evaluation processes. More research is needed to examine how designs for supporting learners’ epistemic growth can be adapted to different educational levels and contexts.

Yet it would be misleading to describe the development and investigation of these design principles and their applications simply as an offshoot of the theoretical frameworks. Rather, insights from design work have had a formative contribution to the development of the frameworks themselves. For example, we observed that, given appropriate materials and prompts, learners can successfully develop, articulate, and elaborate rich epistemic ideals for good models (e.g., answers the question, provides visual aids, supported by evidence) or good sources (e.g., expert authors, no vested interests) (Barzilai et al., 2020; Barzilai, Tal-Savir, Chinn, et al., 2023; Chinn et al., 2018). This suggested that it is indeed reasonable to expect learners to metacognitively understand and regulate their epistemic ideals. Further, empirical research has shown that students as young as fifth graders can not only develop and use productive ideals for good models, such as “models should fit relevant evidence.” They can also metacognitively justify why these criteria are valuable, such as saying that evidence makes the model believable or correct (Murphy et al., 2021). This suggests a new theoretical conjecture: A shared understanding of why such criteria are valuable might help students see why it is worth using them and hence motivate their use (Chinn et al., 2021). In this sense, the descriptive and the design aspects of our work were coevolving and mutually supportive (Greene, 2022).

Greene (2022) identified practicality as a virtue of theories. We argue that in the case of educational theories, this virtue is manifested when the theory can suggest principles or provide useful affordances for the design of curricula, learning environments, and instruction. One of the reasons we have continued to develop and apply the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks is that we have repeatedly found them useful for conceptualizing and refining our designs. In turn, the applications of theoretical frameworks to multiple design problems can also influence theory development. Thus, design is both a catalyst for theoretical development and the critical arena for testing the fruitfulness and practicality of educational theories. However, theories themselves often cannot be tested directly; rather, an additional layer of design principles or conjectures is needed to bridge between the high-level theoretical assumptions and their instantiation in specific domains and instructional contexts.

Reflection 5. Developing an Evidence Base Across Diverse Contexts

Empirical evidence plays various roles in theory development. Empirical evidence can provide a degree of corroboration for theories, and it can pose anomalies that require theory revision or abandonment (Chinn & Brewer, 1993). Evidence gathered within a theoretical framework can also provide an integrative, unified understanding of heterogeneous phenomena (Kitcher, 1993). For example, evolutionary theory unifies diverse phenomena in a common explanatory framework, such as different types of predation and diverse environmental changes are all brought together as instances of selective pressures. Analogously, the studies conducted using the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks highlight commonalities and differences in epistemic thinking that manifest in different particularities.

A growing body of research on people’s aims, ideals, and processes has examined a broad range of learners, from elementary school students (Cottone et al., 2023; Murphy et al., in press), secondary school students (Abed & Barzilai, 2023; Barzilai, 2017; Chinn et al., 2018), and university students (Dishon et al., 2024; Leung, 2020) to teachers (Barnes et al., 2020; Lunn Brownlee et al., 2022; Mor-Hagani & Barzilai, 2022; Primor & Barzilai, 2024) and scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and history (Greene et al., 2021; Kainulainen et al., 2022). Across these studies, people have been found to use a diverse range of aims, ideals, and processes and to apply them to different epistemic products. Table 1 presents examples of aims, ideals, and processes from two of these studies. Another important finding emerging from these studies is that teachers and students can and do engage with aims, ideals, and processes across all five aspects of epistemic performance.

Further, in line with our expectation that epistemic thinking can be highly contextualized, we have found that people’s aims, ideals, and processes are often tailored to the information sources and tasks they engage in. For example, the disciplinary nature of aims was demonstrated by Kainulainen et al. (2022) in a study of Finnish historians. The aims these historians discussed included some that are common across many disciplines such as understanding, knowledge, and explanation. But they also included aims more specific to history, such as creating narratives, forming interpretations, and giving a historical voice to people previously ignored by historians.

People can also employ some overlapping ideals and processes on different tasks. For example, in a study of how adolescents evaluate both YouTube videos and webpages on climate change (Abed & Barzilai, 2023), communicative criteria such as the visual quality of the information sources were the most common type of criteria used in both media, and source expertise was seldom used in either context. Yet students were more likely to use verbal content quality criteria, such as clarity or conciseness, to evaluate webpages than to evaluate videos.

Studies have highlighted that aims, ideals, and processes are not only contextualized but also interrelated. For example, Primor and Barzilai (2024) documented associations between language teachers’ epistemic aims for integrating multiple texts and their criteria for evaluating students’ integrative essays. Teachers who were more mindful of knowledge aims, such as developing knowledge or understanding multiple perspectives, were more likely to evaluate the essays according to whether they included cross-textual generalizations.

Although Apt-AIR was developed as a normative framework to identify the goals of epistemic education, it has also been used to analyze epistemic performance at a descriptive level, such as the performance exhibited in classroom talk (Cottone et al., 2023; Hussain-Abidi et al., 2023). This involves identifying engagement with aims, ideals, and processes across the five aspects of epistemic performance. In such analyses, what is of most interest is which aims, ideals, and processes are deployed and how students engage with them (e.g., Leung, 2020). Through such studies, educators gain insights into students’ existing resources and strengths and can also identify directions for further growth that can be the focus of instruction.

Applications of Apt-AIR to analyze discourse highlight the importance of distinguishing between epistemic performance and apt epistemic performance. The framework supports analysis of the aims, ideals, and processes that people are engaged with, along with the aspects of their engagement. This is their epistemic performance. But judging whether their performance is apt requires an additional, normative judgment about the quality of that engagement with aims, ideals, and processes and about what counts as a successful engagement outcome. This judgment is task-dependent and requires expertise in the domain of interest.

To summarize, a growing body of empirical evidence provides support for our assumptions that learners and teachers commonly engage with epistemic aims, ideals, and processes and that they do so along the five aspects of engagement that we have posited. Further, the Apt-AIR framework provides a unifying framework that can be used to understand commonalities and diversity in epistemic performance in many arenas. Thus, we believe that the framework exemplifies the theoretical virtue of scope discussed by Greene (2022). The range of investigations also reveals great diversity in epistemic performance. Given the great variation in people, disciplines, cultures, settings, and epistemic products, we believe that it is a virtue for theories to illuminate this diversity. The capacity to highlight heterogeneity is a virtue of theories in a world where heterogeneity is to be expected (Bryan et al., 2021; Longino, 1996).

Reflection 6. Uptake and Dialogue in the Research Community

Theory development never occurs in a vacuum. Rather, diverse interpretations, adaptations, and extensions of theories by other researchers continually suggest new ways to elaborate the framework and highlight areas that require further clarification and refinement. This constructive conversation within the research community is an important input for theory advancement.

In this section, we illustrate these processes by examining the extensions of the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks to teaching and teacher education. These frameworks were initially developed mostly with learners in mind, rather than teachers. However, from early on, teacher educators started working with our theories, applying and extending them in innovative ways to the study of teachers’ epistemic thinking and development. Their work, in turn, inspired us to refine the frameworks further in our own research.

An early application of the AIR model to teaching and teacher education was proposed by Buehl and Fives in a chapter in the Handbook of Epistemic Cognition (Buehl & Fives, 2016; see further development in Fives et al., 2017). Buehl and Fives (2016) pointed out that research on teachers’ epistemic thinking must take into account that teachers have two distinct tasks—learning and teaching—and that each of these tasks involves different implementations of epistemic thinking to achieve meaningful outcomes. When teachers engage in epistemic thinking for their own learning, they engage in achieving their own epistemic aims, such as acquiring knowledge and understanding related to content domains, child development, and pedagogy. In contrast, when teachers engage in epistemic thinking in teaching, they focus on supporting or facilitating students’ epistemic aims, such as promoting students’ knowledge and understanding (Buehl & Fives, 2016; Fives et al., 2017). Barnes et al. (2020) empirically demonstrated how teachers can flexibly switch between focusing on their own epistemic aims and focusing on students’ epistemic aims as they evaluate students’ assessments.

This work led Mor-Hagani and Barzilai (2022) to ask themselves how teachers’ epistemic performance can be described in light of the Apt-AIR framework. Building on the distinction made by Buehl and Fives (2016), they proposed that teachers can engage in two kinds of epistemic performance: Epistemic performance for learning involves teachers’ capabilities and dispositions to achieve their own epistemic aims competently and successfully; epistemic performance in teaching involves teachers’ capabilities and dispositions to support students’ competent and successful achievement of their epistemic aims. Mor-Hagani and Barzilai (2022) found that in-service teachers who participated in a course on digital information literacy reflected collectively on all five aspects of epistemic performance described by the Apt-AIR framework in the context of their learning aims (epistemic performance for learning) as well as their teaching aims (epistemic performance in teaching). This provided further support for Buehl and Five’s (2016) proposals. Furthermore, teachers’ epistemic performance for learning and in teaching was found to be interrelated: Teachers’ reflections on changes in their own epistemic performance informed their plans for fostering their students’ epistemic performance (Mor-Hagani & Barzilai, 2022).

Recent research has specified in greater detail how teachers engage with diverse epistemic aims, ideals, and processes in the context of learning and teaching (e.g., Barnes et al., 2020; Lunn Brownlee et al., 2019, 2022; Mor-Hagani & Barzilai, 2022; Primor & Barzilai, 2024; Rinehart et al., 2020). Teachers have been found to engage with epistemic ideals and processes related both to their own epistemic aims, such as developing their own knowledge or their understanding of what students know, and to their students’ epistemic aims, such as promoting students’ knowledge and understanding. These aims can be dynamic, context-dependent, and encompass multiple grain sizes related to individual learners, classes, or domains of content and practice (Barnes et al., 2020). Taken together, these findings extend the Apt-AIR framework to more fully account for the dual nature of teachers’ epistemic performance.

Another valuable extension of the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks has been the development and study of approaches for fostering teachers’ epistemic growth. Building on the AIR model, Lunn Brownlee et al. (2017) proposed a conceptual framework of change in teachers’ epistemic cognition that centered on the role of explicit reflection. In a nutshell, they proposed that teachers can identify epistemic aims in the context of their teaching, consider which teaching practices can help reliably achieve these epistemic aims, decide on a course of action, enact it, and reflect on its outcomes. In subsequent studies, Lunn Brownlee et al., (2019, 2022) applied this framework to design a pedagogy for preparing teacher educators to teach for diversity: They invited teacher educators to collaboratively reflect on what pre-service teachers need to know about diversity (epistemic aims); to consider how they can know if they achieved these aims (ideals); and to think of reliable ways of achieving their aims (reliable processes). From an Apt-AIR perspective, Lunn Brownlee and colleagues engaged teacher educators in two main aspects of epistemic performance: metacognitive reflection on aims, ideals, and processes (aspect 3) and collaborative dialogue about meaningful applications of epistemic aims, ideals, and processes in their teaching (aspect 5).

Research by Lunn Brownlee and colleagues suggested that teachers might benefit from engaging in multiple aspects of epistemic performance. Building on this work, Mor-Hagani and Barzilai (2022) designed a digital information literacy course for in-service teachers to support teachers’ engagement with all five aspects of epistemic performance described by the Apt-AIR framework. Analysis of teachers’ learning journals and interviews suggested that the course activities indeed supported cognitive engagement, metacognitive engagement, and caring about epistemic performance for learning and in teaching (aspects 1, 3, and 4 of Apt-AIR; Barzilai & Chinn, 2018). However, teachers were less likely to reflect on the adaptive and social nature of epistemic performance (aspects 2 and 5 of Apt-AIR; Barzilai & Chinn, 2018), suggesting that these aspects may require more extensive support. This study demonstrates how the Apt-AIR framework might inform the design of teacher education and help identify which aspects of teachers’ epistemic performance may require more support.

In terms of theory development, research in this arena highlights the role of other scholars in opening up new ways of interpreting, adapting, and developing theoretical frameworks. The extensions of the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks to teaching and teacher education were driven by the scholarship of researchers who started applying these frameworks in novel and fruitful ways. We have continually learned from this work and from opportunities to engage in conversations with other researchers. This work has developed and elaborated the frameworks further by applying them in new ways to support teachers.

Reflection 7. Responding to Emerging Real-World Challenges

Educational theories are often confronted by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, they are constrained by the stable features of human cognition, reasoning, and affect, as well as by the slow-changing structures of education systems. On the other hand, they are employed in the context of dynamic real-world processes and events that can sometimes dramatically reshape peoples’ social, cultural, technological, and natural environments. In the twenty-first century, students and teachers increasingly need to cope with the challenges of a VUCA world: a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (Hadar et al., 2020). For example, education should prepare young people to cope with a world in which climate change and epidemics pose new challenges to environments and health and in which generative artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how people consume and produce knowledge. Productive educational theories must negotiate this tension—grounded in the realities of learning and schooling while robust and flexible enough to respond to rapid social, cultural, technological, and environmental changes. The fruitfulness of such theories is demonstrated when they help explain novel challenges and suggest pathways for addressing them.

One of the pressing concerns that instigated our work on the Apt-AIR framework was the array of challenges posed to citizens by the so-called “post-truth” condition, by which we refer to a complex of threats that make it difficult for people to know what is true or accurate (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). We began developing the Apt-AIR framework in 2016, a year marked by the explosion of misinformation, disinformation, science denial, and other forms of “information disorder” online (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Like many others, we viewed these threats as grave. Rejection of climate change science poses a peril to the entire planet. Lack of agreement on any facts or truths can make it impossible to agree on policies to address threats to humanity and the planet. Baseless conspiracy theories can undermine election processes. Moreover, the denial of science, expertise, and sometimes the very notion of truth are all part of the playbook of authoritarians who seek to subvert democracy (Naím, 2022).

These concerns preoccupied us as we developed the Apt-AIR framework. A core goal was to develop a framework that would be flexible enough to address a range of current epistemic challenges as well as unforeseen ones. This motivated us, for example, to adopt fully apt epistemic performance as the primary goal of epistemic education because this was a powerful conceptualization that could address challenges of reasoning in a “post-truth” word as well as ongoing educational challenges. This also motivated the identification of adaptivity as a core aspect of apt epistemic performance, so that students would be well-prepared to address a broader range of epistemic challenges.

We took another step toward addressing the challenges of misinformation and science denial in a 2020 paper that reviewed a wide range of educational responses to the “post-truth” condition (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). We had found that educational responses to the “post-truth” condition varied widely in their analyses and proposed educational solutions. These ranged from studies addressing learners’ media and news literacy (e.g., Hobbs, 2017) to research on cognitive biases (e.g., Britt et al., 2019). It was hard to bring coherence to the many proposals, but we realized that the AIR framework provided us with a tool to understand their differences. On our analysis, the different educational responses to the “post-truth” condition could be organized into four categories or lenses, which reflect different kinds of breakdowns in competent engagement with epistemic aims, ideals, and processes (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). The first lens, not knowing how to know, views people as susceptible to misinformation and disinformation because they are unaware of good ideals or reliable processes for distinguishing between reliable and unreliable information and sources online (e.g., Wineburg & McGrew, 2019). The second lens, fallible ways of knowing, suggests that people’s efforts to achieve truth or accuracy are stymied by unreliable cognitive processes (such as biased or lazy reasoning) that obstruct their efforts (e.g., Britt et al., 2019; Pennycook & Rand, 2019; Sinatra et al., 2014). The third lens, not caring about truth (enough), views “post-truth” problems as arising from not caring enough about aims of truth and accuracy to make the effort to examine ideals and engage in reliable processes for vetting claims and sources (McIntyre, 2018). Finally, according to the fourth lens, disagreeing about how to know, “post-truth” problems are a reflection of deep disagreements about which aims and ideals are valuable or appropriate and which processes are reliable (Chinn et al., 2020). For example, vaccine supporters typically adopt an ideal that beliefs about vaccinations should fit the relevant body of scientific evidence, whereas vaccine skeptics may adopt an ideal that beliefs must fit with their own intuitions, or they may demand a very high level of certainty, which science typically cannot achieve (Chinn et al., 2020; Kata, 2012).

In our review, we argued that all these lenses are needed to explain the various reasons why people can find it hard to reason well in a “post-truth” world (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). Consequently, instructional responses related to all four lenses are needed to collectively address “post-truth” challenges. We also described a rich range of educational and psychological approaches to addressing the problems described within each of these four lenses. We developed these ideas further in a 2021 paper, written with Ravit Duncan, in which we capitalized on the five aspects of the Apt-AIR framework to develop a set of design principles that addressed breakdowns in learners’ competence to reason well in a “post-truth” world (Chinn et al., 2021). These design principles represent another instance in which we built on the core theoretical framework and added a layer of design conjectures that bridge between the framework and design of learning environments and instruction to address a specific educational need. Space precludes a complete recapitulation of the design principles we proposed; here we briefly note just two of them. See Chinn et al. (2021) for a full description.

First, it is important to engage students in learning in increasingly authentic learning environments—with varied information sources that have diverse evidence, reliability, emotional impact, and so on. Learning in such authentic environments can expose students to the difficulties that they will encounter online, so that they can learn the broad range of aims, ideals, and reliable processes needed to deal with these challenges and develop commitments for doing so. Accordingly, in our design work, we have sought to increasingly incorporate unreliable and conflicting information sources into classroom learning environments (Barzilai et al., 2023a, b, c; Rinehart et al., 2016).

Second, it is important for students to develop an understanding of epistemic systems—that is, institutions, organizations, and social procedures for producing and spreading knowledge (Greene, 2016). Students need to develop a grasp both of those systems that are mostly reliable, such as science, and of those that are unreliable, such as disinformation networks that spread and amplify disinformation online (Bengani & Jackson, 2024). It is also vital to recognize how biases and power structures can vitiate the reliability of knowledge produced by various knowledge systems as well as how to mitigate these problems. Recent design work has focused on enabling students to understand the “messy” practices of science and why they can be reliable despite their messiness (Chinn et al., 2023; Leung, 2024; Leung & Cheng, 2021).

In this final reflection, we have argued that a virtue of educational theories is that they need to be well-adapted to the features of human cognition, learning, and schooling while also being flexible enough to address emerging and unforeseen challenges. The fruitfulness of a theory is tested when it can help explain novel challenges and suggest pathways for addressing them. Theories can help explain novel challenges by clarifying crucial similarities and differences among various phenomena and their accounts. Theories should also harbor the potential to respond to novel challenges by drawing on their core principles in new ways. At the same time, new challenges can invite elaboration and expansion of the applications of the theory so that it can apply to novel situations and contexts.

Future Directions

The AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks emerged from two interrelated motivations. One was to better understand learners’ epistemic thinking and performance as they pursue a range of valuable epistemic goals—such as verifying online claims, constructing models and arguments, and creating knowledge deliberatively with others. The other was to develop instructional approaches that can foster growth in learners’ capabilities and dispositions to achieve such goals. Underlying this work is our fundamental assumption that learning to evaluate knowledge claims, to understand and negotiate multiple viewpoints, and to appreciate complex explanations and arguments are essential to young people’s intellectual development and also to the very functioning of democratic societies. As we have worked on these frameworks, the challenges facing our democracies have dramatically increased. These include the combined threats of unbridled disinformation and the rise of authoritarian leaders who endeavor to erode the democratic and epistemic institutions that limit their power, such as the judiciary system, academia, and free press. Looking ahead, we expect these threats will not go away any time soon, and may even increase. In today’s “post-truth,” VUCA world, supporting learners’ capacity for apt epistemic performance has become more important than ever.

Thus, the most important future direction is to expand and accelerate efforts to develop powerful, scalable instruction that fosters learners’ epistemic growth toward fully apt epistemic performance in contemporary networked societies. To do this, it will be important to continue to develop and investigate instructional designs and learning environments that give students opportunities to learn how to deal with the epistemic challenges they will encounter outside of school. Efforts should focus on supporting learners’ competencies to evaluate information and sources in environments shaped by social media and generative AI as well as on their competencies to construct and evaluate complex explanations and arguments that go beyond simple answers.

In addition to supporting learners’ cognitive and metacognitive engagement with epistemic aims, ideals, and processes, it will be valuable in future work to attend more to two less-studied aspects of epistemic performance. First, more attention should be devoted to fostering learners’ intellectual virtues or dispositions to engage in epistemically challenging tasks and to employ reliable epistemic processes and ideals (Baehr, 2021; Chinn et al., 2021). These intellectual virtues or dispositions include habits of mind such as intellectual humility, carefulness, and open-mindedness. They are important for motivating apt epistemic performance, and more research is needed to study effective ways of fostering them.

Second, more attention should be paid to the social aspects of epistemic performance. Students should learn to acknowledge, respect, and negotiate multiple perspectives in pluralistic societies, developing competence in discussing and trying to work through disagreements, while taking other points of view into account. This should include learning to recognize and address challenges of epistemic injustice, such as those that might occur when people’s testimony is unfairly ignored or when people are deprived of access to knowledge or valuable ways of knowing (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018; Fricker, 2007).

A final, interrelated future direction is to use Apt-AIR as a tool to help provide a better understanding of epistemic growth by charting changes in aims, ideals, and processes over time, as well as their use across different aspects of epistemic performance. This may provide insights into the trajectories and mechanisms of epistemic growth that could further improve and enrich the design of instruction and learning environments. It can also provide insights into the types of tasks, materials, scaffolds, and discourse that can support epistemic growth across the span of educational development. For example, cross-sectional studies can be used to compare learners’ epistemic aims, ideals, and reliable processes over age and education (e.g., Potocki et al., 2020). Additionally, qualitative and microgenetic studies could be used to illuminate mechanisms of change in adoption of epistemic components over time (e.g., Av-Shalom, 2024; Dishon et al., 2024).

Conclusion

The AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks represent an effort to create a holistic approach to epistemic thinking that integrates insights from philosophy, education, and psychology. Empirical findings support their value in illuminating how people think across a variety of tasks. These findings demonstrate how epistemic aims, ideals, and reliable processes, as well as five aspects of engagement with these components, exhibit both commonalities and differences across diverse tasks and settings. These frameworks have also fruitfully informed the development and analysis of instruction that advances students’ epistemic performance across diverse instructional contexts.

The development of the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks has been driven by a variety of factors. Foremost among these is the imperative to address pressing educational challenges that demand new and innovative solutions. We believe that this imperative can be best achieved by bringing together powerful ideas from multiple traditions that have grappled with the challenges of conceptualizing and promoting better thinking. We sought to develop a framework complex enough to characterize sophisticated thinking, while also one that could be readily adapted and tailored by educators to address the diversity of aims, ideals, and processes that learners might need to employ across different contexts. Findings from studies of learners’ and teachers’ epistemic thinking and from efforts to promote growth in thinking have helped the research community elaborate and refine the frameworks. Our chief aspiration is that the frameworks will continue to be fruitfully applied by scholars worldwide to gain insights into learners’ and teachers’ epistemic thinking and to design instruction that can meet the challenges of our current times.