Understanding the Nature and Types of Knowledge in Educational Research

Every research study begins with an assumption about what counts as knowing something. Before a scholar designs a survey, runs an experiment, or interviews a classroom of students, they are already relying on a particular idea of what knowledge is and how it gets built. Understanding these ideas is not just a philosophical exercise, it shapes how researchers frame their questions, judge the evidence in front of them, and defend their conclusions to peers. This post breaks down the nature of knowledge, the three philosophical traditions that explain where it comes from, and the different types of knowledge that researchers and educators lean on every day.

What is knowledge? 🔗

Knowledge is more than a pile of facts sitting in someone’s head. It is what forms when raw information is tested, organised, and connected to a bigger picture of how the world works. In educational research, this distinction matters a great deal because not all knowledge carries the same weight, and not all of it is built the same way. Researchers typically separate knowledge into two broad categories: personal knowledge and scientific knowledge.

Personal knowledge: what experience teaches you 🔗

Personal knowledge is the understanding you build through your own experiences, trial and error, and day-to-day observation. A teacher who has spent fifteen years in a government school classroom develops a strong sense of what keeps a restless group of ten-year-olds engaged, even without ever reading a single research paper on classroom management. This kind of knowledge is often tacit, meaning it is hard to put into words, and it is deeply shaped by context. Researchers studying tacit dimensions of learning in higher education point out that a large share of professional expertise is picked up informally, through practice and something close to apprenticeship, rather than through formal instruction alone. Personal knowledge is valuable and often surprisingly accurate, but it is difficult to generalise because it stays tied to one person’s specific circumstances and experiences.

Scientific knowledge: tested, shared, and open to challenge 🔗

Scientific knowledge, by contrast, is built through systematic observation, experimentation, and scrutiny from other experts. It does not depend on any single person’s memory or gut feeling; instead it is checked, repeated, and revised by a community of researchers before it earns wide acceptance. A defining feature of scientific knowledge is that it stays provisional. Writers on the philosophy of science describe scientific claims as reliable and robust yet never fully settled, since new evidence can update or even overturn conclusions that once seemed certain. This is exactly why journals, conferences, and peer review exist: they give a claim about teaching or learning a real chance to be tested before it gets treated as established fact. When a researcher studies whether a new teaching method improves reading scores among school students, that claim only becomes accepted knowledge once other researchers can repeat the study under similar conditions and arrive at comparable results.

The line between personal and scientific knowledge is not always as sharp as textbooks suggest. Many good research questions actually start life as a personal hunch, an experienced teacher’s intuition about what seems to help a struggling learner. What separates that hunch from scientific knowledge is the process it goes through next: systematic testing, honest documentation, and a willingness to be proven wrong.

Three philosophical traditions of knowledge 🔗

Where does knowledge actually come from in the first place? Philosophers have argued over this question for centuries, and their answers broadly cluster into three traditions: rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism. Each tradition hands researchers a different lens for deciding what should count as valid evidence, and each still shapes how educational research gets designed today.

The rationalistic tradition: knowing through reason 🔗

Rationalists argue that reason, not the senses, is the most trustworthy path to knowledge. In this view, certain truths can be grasped through logical thought alone, without needing to test them out in the physical world. Mathematics is the textbook example: two plus three equals five regardless of who checks it or when, because the truth follows from logical rules rather than from observation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces this tradition back to thinkers who believed that certain ideas and structures of reasoning are built into the human mind itself, rather than picked up from the outside world. In educational research, rationalistic thinking shows up whenever a researcher builds a theoretical model or uses logical deduction to predict how a concept, such as motivation or self-efficacy, should behave before any data has even been collected.

The empirical tradition: knowing through experience 🔗

Empiricists take the opposite position: knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience rather than abstract reasoning. John Locke’s idea of the mind as a blank slate, gradually filled in only through lived experience, sits at the centre of this tradition, as this introductory overview of epistemology explains. Empirical knowledge is built by observing, measuring, and testing, which happens to be how most educational research actually operates today. When a researcher administers a questionnaire to a thousand college students or spends a semester observing classroom interactions, they are working firmly within the empirical tradition: conclusions are drawn from what was genuinely seen or measured, not from theory sitting on its own.

The pragmatic tradition: knowing through what works 🔗

Pragmatism takes a more practical stance than either of the two traditions above. Instead of asking whether a belief matches some abstract, unchanging truth, pragmatists ask whether that belief works in practice and produces useful results. The tradition grew partly as a reaction against the sharp divide between rationalism and empiricism, insisting that both reasoning and experience matter, but mainly to the extent that they help solve real problems people actually face. An analysis of epistemological traditions in research methodology notes that pragmatism gained ground precisely because it resisted the idea that all knowledge must be forced into one rigid, universal method. In education, pragmatism shows up clearly in mixed-methods research, where scholars combine numbers with interviews simply because doing so answers the research question better than sticking rigidly to one method alone.

These three traditions rarely appear in pure form inside a single study. A thesis on classroom motivation might use rationalist logic to build its hypotheses, empirical surveys to gather evidence, and a pragmatic willingness to mix methods when the data demands it. Recognising which tradition is guiding a piece of research helps you judge what kind of evidence that researcher considers convincing, and where their claims might be limited.

Types of knowledge in educational research 🔗

Beyond asking where knowledge comes from, researchers also classify knowledge by what it actually lets you do. Educational psychologist John Biggs proposed an influential framework built around four related types: declarative, procedural, conditional, and functioning knowledge.

Declarative knowledge: knowing that something is true 🔗

Declarative knowledge covers facts, concepts, and information that can be stated directly. It answers the question “what is it?” Knowing that Bloom’s taxonomy has six cognitive levels, or that a t-test compares the means of two groups, is declarative knowledge. Biggs describes this as second-hand knowledge that is typically told or written down for students, rather than discovered independently. It forms essential groundwork, but on its own it does not tell a learner how to actually use what they know.

Procedural knowledge: knowing how to do something 🔗

Procedural knowledge is the know-how behind a skill, the steps and strategies needed to carry out a task. Knowing the definition of an experimental research design is declarative; knowing how to actually design and run a valid experiment, control for confounding variables, and analyse the resulting data is procedural. This type of knowledge tends to become more automatic with repeated practice, which is why an experienced researcher can plan a study far more quickly than a first-year student attempting the same task. Assessment researchers point out that procedural knowledge is best tested through problems that require applying a concept to a new situation, rather than through questions that simply ask learners to recall a definition.

Conditional knowledge: knowing when and why 🔗

Conditional knowledge sits a level above both declarative and procedural knowledge. It is the judgement of when to use a particular fact or procedure, and why one strategy suits a situation better than another. A student may know several revision techniques and be perfectly capable of carrying out each one, but conditional knowledge is what tells them to reach for concept mapping when preparing a complex essay topic and for flashcards when the task is straightforward vocabulary recall. Work on metacognitive knowledge types treats conditional knowledge as the most sophisticated of the three classic categories, since it requires learners to monitor their own thinking and adjust their approach as circumstances change.

Functioning knowledge: putting knowledge into action 🔗

Functioning knowledge is Biggs’ term for knowledge a learner can genuinely use in real, often unfamiliar, situations, rather than simply recite on demand. It is the difference between a trainee teacher who can define constructivist pedagogy neatly on an exam paper and one who can actually plan and adapt a lesson using constructivist principles when the class does not go according to plan. Functioning knowledge develops through activities that push learners to apply, argue, and create, rather than only remember. This is precisely why educators are encouraged to design assessments around tasks, presentations, and projects rather than relying only on tests that reward memorisation.

Taken together, these four types of knowledge explain why good educational research values more than fact recall. A well-designed study, curriculum, or teacher-training programme needs to build declarative foundations, sharpen procedural skill, cultivate conditional judgement, and ultimately aim for functioning knowledge that holds up outside the exam hall or the research lab, in an actual classroom, with actual students.

What do you think? When you look back at your own coursework, which type of knowledge did it focus on the most, and did that preparation actually help you use what you learned once you were out of the classroom? Do you find yourself leaning more towards a rationalist, an empiricist, or a pragmatist way of deciding what counts as reliable knowledge?

References

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5413544/
2. https://science-education-research.com/teaching-science/nature-of-science/the-nature-of-scientific-knowledge/
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
4. https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-epistemology/chapter/sources-of-knowledge-rationalism-empiricism-and-the-kantian-synthesis/
5. https://sites.evergreen.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2016/08/hjorland-empiricism-rationalism-and-positivism.pdf
6. https://didatticaonline.pfse-auxilium.org/pluginfile.php/9790/mod_glossary/attachment/141/BIGGS_2003_Aligning_Reaching_and_Assessing_to_Course_Objectives_John_Biggs.pdf
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662862/
8. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11739