Conceptions of Truth in Higher Education. A Pillar of Research-Teaching Nexus

As future professionals, students in higher professional education are expected to learn to apply and create new knowledge. In deciding how to create an educational programme to result in these aims, not only conceptions of ‘knowledge’, but also the notion of ‘truth’ is an important part of the debate. In deciding how to connect research and teaching, ‘research’ can be considered a (but not the only) procedure to provide ‘evidence’ for the relation between reality and its reflections. This article reports the development and first results of an instrument to measure academics’ conceptions of truth. Based on a newly developed measurement instrument academics were asked to share their perception on what can be considered ‘true’. A combined PCA and PRINCALS analysis results in four latent factors on truth and three clusters of academics. Implications for the connection of research and teaching are discussed.