Epistemological Beliefs Assessment for Physical Science (EBAPS)
Measures students' views about the nature of knowledge and learning in the physical sciences along five non-orthogonal dimensions (structure of scientific knowledge, nature of knowing and learning, real-life applicability, evolving knowledge, & source of ability to learn.
Average Review: 
(3.0)
by Isaiah Sommers,
, ,
The EBAPS has attempted to take the normal, boring format of a survey and spice it up a bit with theoretical agree/disagree statements, student dialogue vignettes, and role-play multiple choice questions. The intent was most likely to make students more honest by making questions more engaging, but between the complexity and the sheer length of each question, this format would probably have the opposite effect. While the questions do address the target themes, they are so long that a student would simply get too overwhelmed or bored halfway the survey and stop spending effort to think about an answer, which throws off the accuracy. This could only work in a classroom of very motivated, concentrated students with ample time (more than 20 minutes) to fill out the survey.
Meanwhile, the survey reveals various elements of thoughts about science, but the scoring scheme takes reduces them to a single 1-4 scale of "sophisticated-ness," potentially ignoring important information shared in the survey. In sum, this tool takes significant time and effort to fill out and requires a more complicated tool to analyze the data.
