The earlier research on teacher and subject matter of knowledge attempted to find statistical relationship between what teachers know and the achievement of their students. The researchers presented subject matter, either as the total numbers of classes that a teacher had taken in a subject matter or a teacher’s average grade point or a teacher score on a standardized achievement test. These indicators of subject matter knowledge were coordinating with student achievement on standardized tests.
Early researchers, on education, were characterized by a highly, rationalistic view of epistemologies and other areas of thought and practice. These are also about the internal composition of teacher epistemologics. This type of work was carried out almost exclusively by philosophers and behavioural scientists.
It was argued that an understanding of knowledge involved a series of logically independent but related questions, the answers to which had to be reconciled with one another, more or less ‘laterality’ “What is knowledge?” Give an answer to this question “what knowledge is most reliable or important”? How does
knowledge arise”? How ought the research for knowledge to be conducted? And “How is knowledge taught?”
The first systematic attempt to discover the nature of the epistemological beliefs of teachers (and other professional groups) was carried out by Royce (1959– 1964). Royce carried out interviews with subjects from a number of occupational backgrounds, identifying the occurrence of four type of epistemological validity criteria in varying context and continuations “rationalism thinking” empiricism sensing”, “intuitions feeling”, and “authoritarianism accepting”.
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