| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 工程技術研究所 === 97 === This study first explored 138 tenth graders’ informal reasoning on the Socio-scientific issue, and then investigated the relationships among their informal reasoning, their epistemological beliefs, their conceptions of learning, and their personal goal orientations. An open-ended questionnaire was utilized to probe the students’ informal reasoning on the issue regarding whether to construct Su-Hua highway. The students were asked to fill in the questionnaire, and their responses were transformed into qualitative data for analyzing their evaluative criteria formation, reasoning quality and reasoning modes. In addition to the open-ended questionnaire, this study also used three close-ended questionnaires to investigate students’ epistemological beliefs, conceptions of learning and personal goal orientation. First, the questionnaire of epistemological beliefs included four dimensions: source of knowledge, certainty of knowledge, development of knowledge, and justification for knowing. The second questionnaire of conceptions of learning included six dimensions: memorizing, testing, calculating and practicing, increasing one’s knowledge, applying, and understanding and seeing in a new way. The third questionnaire of personal goal orientation also included four dimensions: mastery-approach goal, mastery-avoidance goal, performance-approach goal, and performance-avoidance goal.
The results of this study indicated that both the epistemological belief and the conception of learning were significant predictors for the students’ personal goal orientation, though the conception of learning was a better predictor than the epistemological belief. The findings also revealed that students who held more sophisticated epistemological beliefs or conceptions of learning tended to posses more advanced personal goal orientations. Moreover, regarding the students’ informal reasoning, only the justification for science knowing could significantly predict the amount of their reasoning modes. Finally, this study suggests that, in order to improve students’ personal goal orientation, teachers should put more emphases on the depth of the knowledge content.
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