The CAEB: An instrument for measuring connotative aspects of epistemological beliefs

This article presents a semantic differential called Connotative Aspects of Epistemological Beliefs (CAEB) developed to assess university studentsʹ epistemological beliefs with adjective pairs such as dynamic–static and objective–subjective. After discussing the theoretical background, data are reported from two validation studies. The aim of the studies was to examine the emerging factor structure in different domains and to test whether CAEB can be used to measure domain-dependent differences in studentsʹ beliefs. Results showed a reasonable two-factor solution. The results further confirmed that the CAEB could measure differences in studentsʹ epistemological beliefs about knowledge in different domains of natural sciences like genetics, physics and plant identification.