COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL ATTITUDE IN STUDENTS FROM LATVIA AND THE NETHERLANDS TOWARDS THE SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE

The tendencies and aspects of the quality of knowledge sources and its content, the cognition of the subject, may be reflected in the use of a socio-psychological phenomenon such as epistemological attitude. The concept of epistemological attitude reflects on the student’s cognitive orientation model, which is based on evaluative aspects of knowledge sources or psychological reactions ñ cognitive, emotionally prognostic, action / behavioural and pragmatic. Based on this model, the Epistemological Attitude Questionnaire (EAQ) was developed to determine the formal and substantive aspects of the assessment of five sources of knowledge, namely, scientific literature and articles, a lecturer in a higher education institution, popular science journals and newspapers, popular science television broadcasts, Internet resources, and significance of the sources of knowledge. The aim of the article is to study the content of student epistemological attitude towards the sources of knowledge and its relation to the study programmes in Latvia and the Netherlands. Results reflected that the content of the epistemological attitude depends on the type of source of knowledge to be studied and evaluated. As well as, peculiarities of source cognition and evaluation among the students of Latvia and the Netherlands have been identified, finding statistically significant differences in the epistemological attitude towards all sources of knowledge to be evaluated. It was found that the study programme was related to the epistemological attitude towards several sources of knowledge in Latvia and the Netherlands. In general, the results of this study show that the peculiarities of cognition of the source of knowledge are related to the type of the source of knowledge, a socio-cultural factor of the student’s academic environment and student’s study direction or study programme.