The nurturing of learners’ ways of knowing is vital for supporting their intellectual growth and their participation in democratic knowledge societies. This paper traces the development of two interrelated theoretical frameworks that describe the nature of learners’ epistemic thinking and performance and how education can support epistemic growth: the AIR and Apt-AIR frameworks. After briefly reviewing these frameworks, we discuss seven reflections on educational theory development that stem from our experiences working on the frameworks. First, we describe how our frameworks were motivated by the goal of addressing meaningful educational challenges. Subsequently, we explain why and how we infused philosophical insights into our frameworks, and we also discuss the steps we took to increase the coherence of the frameworks with ideas from other educational psychology theories. Next, we reflect on the important role of the design of instruction and learning environments in testing and elaborating the frameworks. Equally important, we describe how our frameworks have been supported by empirical evidence and have provided an organizing structure for understanding epistemic performance exhibited in studies across diverse contexts. Finally, we discuss how the development of the frameworks has been spurred by dialogue within the research community and by the need to address emerging and pressing real-world challenges. To conclude, we highlight several important directions for future research. A common thread running through our work is the commitment to creating robust and dynamic theoretical frameworks that support the growth of learners’ epistemic performance in diverse educational contexts.

培养学习者的认知方式对于支持他们的智力成长和参与民主知识社会至关重要。本文追溯了两个相互关联的理论框架的发展：AIR 和 Apt-AIR 框架，这两个理论框架描述了学习者认知思维和表现的本质以及教育如何支持认知成长。在简要回顾这些框架之后，我们讨论了源于我们在这些框架上工作的经验的对教育理论发展的七种反思。首先，我们描述了我们的框架是如何以解决有意义的教育挑战为目标的。随后，我们解释了为什么以及如何将哲学见解注入到我们的框架中，我们还讨论了我们为提高框架与其他教育心理学理论思想的一致性而采取的步骤。接下来，我们反思教学和学习环境的设计在测试和阐述框架中的重要作用。同样重要的是，我们描述了我们的框架如何得到经验证据的支持，并提供一个组织结构来理解不同背景下的研究中表现出的认知表现。最后，我们讨论研究界内部的对话以及解决新出现的紧迫现实挑战的需要如何促进框架的发展。最后，我们强调了未来研究的几个重要方向。贯穿我们工作的一个共同主线是致力于创建强大且动态的理论框架，以支持学习者在不同教育背景下认知表现的增长。