Epistemic fluency, a concept in science education, is little known in nursing.

Epistemic fluency is awareness of how knowledge is created, judged, and used.

Strengthening PhD education involves enhancing students' epistemic fluency.

The idea of reflexivity in qualitative research is related to epistemic fluency.

Strategies to foster reflexivity in students can also help build epistemic fluency.

In the field of learning theory, the concept of epistemic fluency describes how students mature into flexible thinkers able to recognize diverse perspectives and value systems, mobilize different bodies of knowledge and logical operations, identity strengths and limitations in their own knowledge and reasoning, and envision multiple possible solutions to complex problems. While epistemic fluency is a significant area of research in sciences, engineering, and medical education, it has received little explicit attention within nursing. This article highlights a connection between epistemic fluency and reflexivity, a far more familiar concept which is associated with qualitative research methodology and has been studied extensively in nursing. The article advances epistemic fluency as an idea which warrants more attention in doctoral-level nursing education and presents an exemplar teaching activity to illustrate application of this approach in a nursing science classroom. Calling students' attention to their own default assumptions and patterns of reasoning about how knowledge is constructed, the activity is a strategy for introducing students to some of the most complex and often elusive aspects of what it means to become a scholar.

Nursing doctoral education

Epistemic cognition

Epistemic fluency

Reflexivity

Qualitative research methods

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.