Since 2010, the French competitive examination to become high school science teachers includes a test about epistemology and didactic sciences. Moreover, optional epistemology courses for science students are flourishing in “hard sciences” universities as it is the case in our University of Montpellier 2. However, one can hypothesise that some initial students’ conceptions and the institutional epistemological context might constitute obstacles to their development of a sophisticated epistemology. How to study the impact of such epistemological trainings? And, more generally, how to evaluate science university students’ epistemological beliefs and their conceptions about learning and teaching (Chan & Elliott, 2004)?

The majority of existing quantitative instruments that measure beliefs about scientific epistemology, learning and teaching have been constructed and validated among human sciences students (Schommer, 1990; Hofer, 2000), primary students (Elder, 2002; Conley et al. 2004), or in-service school teachers; and they are mostly in English. To our knowledge, a quantitative tool specifically adapted to the French epistemological context has never been designed. Therefore, we developed a quantitative instrument made up of two Likert-type scales to evaluate epistemological beliefs (in science) and conceptions about learning and teaching of university “hard sciences” students, including pre-service secondary and primary teachers. These scales were designed to evaluate the evolutions of students’ epistemological beliefs and learning and teaching conceptions. They are not to characterize their structure, as was described in previous studies (e.g., Schommer, 1990; Hofer, 2000). So we selected the simplest way to asses such a putative evolution; it consists in considering that they vary along a continuum between two extreme positions: naïve and sophisticated poles. Our hypothesis here is that the naïve and sophisticated beliefs about science correspond respectively to the naïve and sophisticated conceptions about learning and teaching. A similar approach was also formulated by Conley et al. (2004). Following Hofer (2000), they focused on the headings of “the nature of knowledge” and “knowing in science”.

In the naïve pole, knowledge is true or false (in absolute), corresponds to additive pieces of information, and can be non-problematically transferred from an expert to a novice. In the sophisticated pole, knowledge arises from human creation, its meaning and value are context-dependent, and its learning implies qualitative rearrangement of previous knowledge. Both poles respectively and partly match with the dualism and multiplicity (or relativism) stages defined by Perry (1970), the traditional and non-traditional views of science or learning defined by Pomeroy (1993), the empiricist and constructivist views of Tsai (1998), and the traditional and constructivist conceptions of Chan & Elliott (2004).

In order to take into account the French epistemological context of “hard sciences” students, we constructed items from the content of epistemological debates with these students. Other items were adapted from existing scales (e.g., Pomeroy, 1993; Chan & Elliott, 2004; Hofer, 2000; Tsai & Liu, 2005, Conley et al. 2004). Preliminary experiments showed that these scales have the potential to evaluate epistemological beliefs and conception evolution (Dang and Hagège, 2011). Here we present the validation study of these scales.

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