Healing from Doubt or Hardening Beliefs? The Impact of Cartesian Method Pedagogy on Student Epistemic Beliefs and Academic Self-Efficacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the pedagogical impact of René Descartes’ method of analysis on higher education students. The central inquiry is whether teaching this method fosters robust, self-reliant inquiry or inadvertently promotes epistemic rigidity. A quasi-experimental, pre-test/post-test design was employed with 180 undergraduate philosophy students across three groups: a Cartesian Method group, a Collaborative Inquiry group, and a Control group. Over an 8-week intervention, we measured changes in epistemic beliefs (certainty, source, justification) and academic self-efficacy using validated scales. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) revealed that the Cartesian Method group showed significant gains in academic self-efficacy for logical argumentation. However, this group also developed stronger beliefs in knowledge certainty and individual intuition as a source of truth, alongside a diminished appreciation for knowledge derived from collaboration or empirical evidence. These findings suggest that while Cartesian pedagogy can bolster confidence in individual reasoning, it risks fostering absolutist epistemic stances, highlighting a critical trade-off for educators designing critical thinking curricula.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".