Updated 18 June 2026
The hidden variable in course design
Course designs are full of implicit epistemological commitments. When a course requires students to construct an argument from primary sources and defend it against alternative interpretations, it assumes that knowledge is tentative, contested, and arrived at through reasoned inquiry. When a course asks students to master an established body of technique and apply it accurately to prescribed problems, it assumes that knowledge is, at least provisionally, settled and that correctness is an achievable and assessable state. When a course treats students’ own professional or lived experience as valid evidence, it assumes that knowledge has multiple legitimate sources and that epistemic authority is distributed rather than conferred. These assumptions are not mistakes; they are disciplinary commitments. The problem is that they are rarely made explicit.
The design team that has not examined its own epistemological commitments cannot anticipate which students will find those commitments natural and which will find them disorienting. A student who enters a humanities degree expecting to encounter a body of settled, authoritative knowledge will be confused and potentially alienated by seminars in which every text is treated as a contested position in a live debate. A student who enters a social science degree expecting to engage in critical analysis and personal interpretation will be frustrated by an assessment regime that rewards only accurate reproduction of established theory. Neither mismatch is the student’s fault; both are design failures.
The scholarship on personal epistemology in the Occidental world has been establishing, since at least the work of Schommer (1990) and the comprehensive synthesis offered by Hofer and Pintrich (1997), that students hold beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing that are meaningfully related to how they engage with academic work. These beliefs, though not fully stable across domains, tend to cluster around a small number of recurring dimensions: beliefs about the certainty and simplicity of knowledge, the source and authority of expertise, the pace and permanence of learning, and whether intellectual capacity is fixed or developed through effort. Students who hold more sophisticated beliefs on these dimensions tend to engage more deeply and strategically. Students who are deemed to hold ‘naive’ beliefs tend to approach learning as the acquisition of settled facts from authoritative sources, and struggle when they encounter disciplines that expect something more uncertain and more demanding.
What is notable about this body of research is that it developed primarily within Western university contexts and predominantly with student populations whose educational backgrounds had already provided some degree of exposure to academic critical inquiry. Hofer and Pintrich (1997) themselves acknowledged the cultural and contextual limits of the existing research base. More recent work on epistemic dominance in higher education has demonstrated that epistemological beliefs are substantially shaped by cultural and educational context, and that the assumptions embedded in internationalised curricula frequently reflect a narrow range of epistemological traditions that not all students share (Stein, 2017). A design team working with a diverse or international cohort is working with epistemological diversity, whether it acknowledges it or not.
The POISEL framework
The POISEL framework (derived from Atkinson, 2014) offers a practical framework for examining these epistemological dimensions in the specific context of course design. Drawing on scholarship in personal epistemology, the framework identifies five key orientations that students may hold, each with implications for how they are likely to experience academic learning. The six dimensions are Pace, Ownership, Innateness, Simplicity, Exactness, and Locality.
A critical caution must be stated before the dimensions are introduced. The table below presents each dimension as a binary concept. These binary formulations are heuristic anchors for team discussion; they are not classifications of student types. In practice, students’ epistemological beliefs exist on a spectrum, and individual students routinely hold more sophisticated orientations on some dimensions while holding more naive ones on others. The POISEL framework is a reflective tool for design teams, not a diagnostic instrument for student assessment. Its value is in the conversation it generates about what the course implicitly assumes, not in its capacity to predict what any given student believes.
| Dimension | Binary concept | Tutorial question | Western Concept of ‘Naive belief statement’ |
| Pace | Quick or not at all | Is hard work enough? | Learning is quick or not at all |
| Ownership | Authority or Reason | Who has the answers? | Knowledge is handed down by authority |
| Innateness | Innate or Acquired | Who is responsible for my learning? | The ability to learn is innate rather than acquired |
| Simplicity | Simple or Complex | Is there a simple answer? | Knowledge is simple rather than complex |
| Exactness | Certain or Tentative | Is there always a right answer? | Knowledge is certain rather than tentative |
| Locality | Universal or Situated | Does place matter to knowledge? | Knowledge is abstract and universally applicable, independent of place or context |
Table 1. The POISEL framework dimensions (after Atkinson, 2014). Western-defined ‘Naive’ belief statements are presented as heuristic anchors for team discussion; they represent orientations on a spectrum, not fixed positions.
Pace concerns students’ beliefs about how quickly knowledge is or should be acquired. Students who hold the naive orientation that learning is quick or not at all will treat persistence through difficulty as evidence of inadequacy rather than of intellectual engagement. They may disengage when material does not resolve quickly, or interpret sustained uncertainty as a sign that they are unsuited to the discipline. A course designed without considering pace beliefs will not routinely address this. A course that has considered them can explicitly name the value of sustained, effortful engagement and design activities that treat difficulty as the expected condition of learning rather than an exception.
Ownership concerns students’ beliefs about who holds the authority to determine what counts as valid knowledge. The naive orientation holds that knowledge is handed down from authority; the sophisticated orientation holds that knowledge is arrived at through reasoned argument, and that its validity is in principle open to challenge. This dimension is consistently identified in the literature as culturally specific (Atkinson, 2024; Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). In cultural and educational contexts where epistemic authority is conferred by social position, age, or institutional role, students may find it genuinely disorienting to be asked to critique published scholarly work, disagree with a lecturer’s interpretation, or adjudicate between competing claims. A course that embeds critical evaluation as a central graduate attribute without acknowledging this dimension will produce exactly the kind of assessment performance gap it was designed to avoid.
Innateness concerns students’ beliefs about whether the capacity to learn and understand is a fixed, innate attribute or something that can be acquired and developed through effort. Students who hold the naive orientation will interpret early difficulty as evidence of permanent limitation rather than a normal feature of novice learning. This dimension maps closely onto the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets in the more recent psychological literature (Dweck, 2007). Its design implication is specific: courses that do not make the developmental arc of disciplinary learning visible, explaining how a novice is expected to progress and what difficulty at each stage is normal, leave students with fixed-ability orientations without the scaffolding they need to reframe struggle as progress.
The value of the POISEL framework lies in the conversation it generates about what the course implicitly assumes, not in its ability to predict what any given student believes.
Simplicity concerns beliefs about whether knowledge is fundamentally clear-cut or inherently complex and contested. The naive orientation assumes that each question has a single correct answer and that complexity is a failure of explanation rather than a property of the subject itself. Students holding this orientation will struggle in disciplines where the appropriate response to a well-formed question is ‘it depends’, and will seek resolution where the discipline expects them to maintain productive tension. Assessment feedback that rewards a nuanced, qualified argument will feel arbitrary to these students unless the design explicitly explains and models why complexity is valued and how it is evidenced.
Exactness concerns beliefs about whether knowledge is certain and determinate or provisional and subject to revision. Alongside Ownership, this is the dimension most frequently associated with cultural specificity (Atkinson, 2024). In the dominant European academic tradition, provisional knowledge is the norm: nothing is proven, only yet to be disproved. This is so thoroughly taken for granted in many disciplines that it is never stated. For students whose educational formation has transmitted knowledge as fixed and certain, encountered through authoritative sources rather than constructed through argument, this assumption presents an epistemic challenge that no amount of generic academic-skills support is well-positioned to address. It is a design challenge that needs to be addressed.
Locality concerns students’ beliefs about whether knowledge is universal and context-independent, or fundamentally rooted in place, community, and ecological or ancestral relationships. The detached or universalist orientation holds that valid academic knowledge is abstract and generalisable, true regardless of where it is produced or applied. This is the dominant assumption of the Cartesian Western epistemological tradition, and it is so thoroughly embedded in internationalised curricula that it is rarely made explicit. The situated or ecocentric orientation holds that knowledge is inseparable from geography, ecosystems, land, and ancestral history. This is not a deficit position: in many indigenous, Pacific, and Southern epistemological traditions, knowledge that is disconnected from place is knowledge that has been impoverished, not knowledge that has been elevated.
A design team working with students from situated epistemological traditions may find that those students’ reluctance to engage with decontextualised or universalised knowledge claims is not a failure of academic capability but a principled epistemic stance. Students who hold an ecocentric orientation may ask, ‘valid for whom, and in what conditions?’ rather than simply accepting that a principle holds universally. This is an analytically sophisticated position, not a naïve one. A course that explicitly names the Locality dimension and acknowledges that place-based and relational knowledge traditions carry their own forms of rigour and authority creates conditions in which a wider range of students can engage on equitable terms. The design implication is consistent with those of the other dimensions: the task is not to convert students from one epistemological orientation to another, but to make the course’s own assumptions visible, and to assess the intellectual work students do rather than the orientation from which they start.
What POISEL means for design
The value of the POISEL framework in course design is not primarily diagnostic. Its purpose is to prompt a design team to examine the implicit epistemological commitments embedded in the course under development and to ask whether those commitments are named for students or remain unspoken assumptions that some students will navigate easily and others will not understand they are being asked to navigate at all. The question is not ‘what do our students believe?’ but ‘what does our course assume, and have we said so?’
The practical implication is direct and actionable. A course whose epistemological commitments are made explicit, through the language of learning outcomes, through the framing of assessment criteria, through the explicit valuing of uncertainty and intellectual risk-taking, and through the modelling of what good work actually looks like in this discipline, is a course that students with a wider range of epistemological orientations can engage with productively. This does not lower expectations; it names them. Naming them at the design stage is substantially easier and more effective than attempting to address them after students have already encountered and been confused by them.
The connection back to the discipline orientation exercise in Brief 3 is direct. A design team that has profiled its discipline’s epistemological commitments, its characteristic relationship to evidence, authority, complexity, and certainty, is now positioned to ask: which students are likely to hold orientations that align naturally with those commitments, and which are likely to find them disorienting? The POISEL exercise does not answer that question definitively; it makes it worth asking. In most design team conversations, simply asking it generates a more nuanced set of design decisions than would otherwise have been reached.
Note on the evolving framing of the framework
The original foundational proposition underpinning the POISEL framework was that ‘all students are international students’: an attempt to build empathy across the design team by universalising the experience of epistemological dislocation. Ongoing engagement with scholarship on epistemic violence and pluriversal education has prompted a reframing of this proposition. The revised formulation, ‘all learners occupy situated epistemological territories’, better reflects the framework’s pluriversal intent. It positions POISEL not as an assimilation toolkit designed to transition students into Western academic norms, but as a compass for navigating dialogue between epistemological traditions on equal terms. The addition of the Locality dimension is the first structural expression of that reframing and signals the direction of the framework’s future development.
References
Atkinson, S. P. (2014). Rethinking personal tutoring systems: The need to build on a foundation of epistemological beliefs. BPP University College. https://sijen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/rethinkingpersonaltutoring.pdf
Atkinson, S. P. (2024). 8-Stage Learning Design Framework: Using student profiles and personas. Sijen Education.
Dweck, C. S. (2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Rep Upd edition). Ballantine Books.
Hofer, B. K., & Pintrich, P. R. (1997). The Development of Epistemological Theories: Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing and Their Relation to Learning. Review of Educational Research, 67(1), 88–140.
Schommer, M. (1990). Effects of beliefs about the nature of knowledge on comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(3), 498–504. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.82.3.498
Stein, S. (2017). The Persistent Challenges of Addressing Epistemic Dominance in Higher Education: Considering the Case of Curriculum Internationalization. Comparative Education Review, 61(S1), S25–S50. https://doi.org/10.1086/690456