What Do We Mean When We Say Epistemic Agency? How Considering Multiple Facets of Epistemic Cognition Can Clarify a Murky Theoretical Construct

ABSTRACT Opening space for students to help shape knowledge building practices in the classroom—that is, epistemic agency—is necessary to achieve a variety of goals held by the science education community. As such, many scholars have explored how students might be positioned with, perceive, and take up epistemic agency. Nonetheless, the field remains unclear and vague about what, exactly, “epistemic agency” means. This is a problem. Without a more precise way to think and talk about epistemic agency, we cannot communicate clearly about agentic moments, design for agentic moments, or consider whether and how these moments build toward our larger goals. To address this problem, we propose a model for parsing epistemic agency: (1) the substance of students' epistemic decision‐making, consisting of three facets, the epistemic Aims, epistemic Ideals, and Reliable processes for pursuing those aims (Chinn et al. 2014); and (2) the consequentiality of students' epistemic decision‐making, characterized in terms of two dimensions— spatial and temporal reach of students' epistemic decisions. We then demonstrate the utility of this multifaceted, multidimensional conceptualization of epistemic agency by comparing two published accounts of students making decisions about useful ways to know and learn. Attending to the multifaceted, multidimensional nature of epistemic agency enables us to move beyond claims of “more” versus “less” epistemic agency and toward nuanced conversations about the aspects of agency that are necessary and appropriate to accomplish particular learning goals in and across moments, and what tensions and trade‐offs arise in doing so.