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EPISTEMOLOGY OF EDUCATION – AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
Authors: Florentina Olimpia AVRAM

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From an epistemological perspective the scientific research in the area of education sciences has some specific characte¬ristics we would like to emphasize in this article, in a synthetic approach. One of the purposes considered is to briefly present some of the most recurrent forms of knowledge in the field of education, namely: reflexive, material, taxonomic, experimental and statistical knowledge. We will emphasise the specificity of each approach and we will insist on the forms encountered in the education sciences unlike the ones belonging to other fields of human knowledge. Approaching the sources of knowledge is an action specific of the education epistemology by which we intend to analyse the historical evolution of these problems within the education sciences. The perspective we propose combines the forms of scientific knowledge and the sources of such knowledge, providing a synthetic picture of the various forms and sources of knowledge, as a foundation of research and investigations in the epistemic field of education. The perspective proposed in this article starts from the premise that the ontological assumptions (concerning the nature of reality and the nature of things, of the realities subject to scientific investi¬ga¬tion) give rise to epistemological assum¬ptions – within the meaning of types of research and investigation of the nature of reality and nature of things. The latter, at their turn, lead to considerations about methodology and the investigation, analysis and collection of the data about these realities. The field of axiology in education is closely connected to ontology and episte¬mology. Such perspective on the reality investigated by science (by the research specific of education sciences) helps us to understand the research methods as a way of understanding the world, the actual educational reality investigated by research and that originates from several sources. These sources are the raw material that underlies knowledge and scientific research.