HISTORICAL ENCOUNTERS | Volume 9 Number 1 (2022) Epistemic beliefs and written historical reasoning: Exploring their relationship Kristin A. Sendur ab Jannet van Drie a Carla van Boxtel a a Research Institute of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands b Center for Individual and Academic Development, Sabanci University, Turkey ABSTRACT In this descriptive study, we investigated undergraduate students’ epistemic beliefs in history and examined the relationship between students’ beliefs and their performance in written historical reasoning in the context of a historical reasoning course. We measured students’ expressed epistemic beliefs in history through a discipline-specific survey, which we compared with students’ performance when writing a source-based historical argument. A subset of students also participated in a task-based interview to investigate more tacit epistemic beliefs related to the second-order concept, account. We found a significant correlation between students’ performance in source-based argumentative writing and their epistemic beliefs regarding historical methodology. Most students’ interview answers corresponded to their epistemic beliefs as indicated in the survey, but there was less correspondence between students’ interviews and writing. This study demonstrates the usefulness of the epistemic beliefs survey and provides evidence that students’ conceptions of the second-order concept, account, may be related to their epistemic beliefs. KEYWORDS Writing, higher education, epistemic beliefs, historical reasoning CITATION Sendur, K. A., van Drie, J., & van Boxtel, C. (2022). Epistemic beliefs and written historical reasoning: Exploring their relationship. Historical Encounters, 9(1), 141-158. https://doi.org/10.52289/hej9.108 COPYRIGHT © Copyright retained by Authors Published 15 April 2022 Distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License