Understanding Epistemological Anarchism (Feyerabend) in Research Reported in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (Wiley-Blackwell)

The Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) is the official journal of the US-based National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), which has members in many countries around the world. JRST started publishing in 1963 and is indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (Thomson-Reuter). In October 2017, I made an online search on the website of JRST with the key words “epistemological anarchism” and “Feyerabend” (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10982736). This gave a total of 21 articles which were evaluated on the same criteria (Levels I–V) as in the previous study (see Chap. 3). Following the guidelines based on Charmaz (2005), presented in Chap. 3, and in order to facilitate credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (cf. Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) of the results, I adopted the following procedure: a) All the 21 articles from the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, were downloaded and after evaluation were classified in one of the five levels, I–V (for levels see Chap. 3); After a period of approximately three months all the articles were evaluated again and there was agreement of 93% between the first and the second evaluation. It is important to note that all the articles evaluated in this study referred to epistemological anarchism in some context, which may not have been the primary or major subject dealt with by the authors. Detailed examples from different levels are presented in the next section. A complete list of all the 21 articles from JRST that were evaluated is presented in Appendix 3. Distribution of all the articles according to author’s area of research, context of the study and level (classification) is presented in Appendix 4.