Teachers' beliefs about school mathematics and mathematicians' mathematics and their relationship to practice

Abstract

There is broad acceptance that mathematics teachers' beliefs about the nature of mathematics influence the ways in which they teach the subject. It is also recognised that mathematics as practised in typical school classrooms is different from the mathematical activity of mathematicians. This paper presents case studies of two secondary mathematics teachers, one experienced and the other relatively new to teaching, and considers their beliefs about the nature of mathematics, as a discipline and as a school subject. Possible origins and future developments of the structures of their belief systems are discussed along with implications of such structures for their practice. It is suggested that beliefs about mathematics can usefully be considered in terms of a matrix that accommodates the possibility of differing views of school mathematics and the discipline.

A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Mathematics Teachers’ Professional Competences (MTPC) in a Mongolian Context

“…A paper by Beswick (2012) suggests that beliefs about mathematics can usefully be considered in terms of a matrix that accommodates the possibility of differing views of school mathematics and the discipline.…”

A Scale for Measuring Teachers’ Mathematics-Related Beliefs: A Validity and Reliability Study

“…Beliefs about the nature of mathematics comprise an individual's subjective knowledge of mathematics as a discipline (Beswick, 2012;Thompson, 1992), so this belief is related to an individual's perspective of the philosophy of mathematics. Meanwhile, teacher beliefs about teaching mathematics comprise the teacher's subjective knowledge on the various types and steps of teaching, meaning teaching and learning, the role of teachers and students in learning, how students learn mathematics, and classroom activities related to the teaching of mathematics (Boz, 2008;Thompson, 1992).…”

Attitudes of Pre-Service Mathematics Teachers towards Modelling: A South African Inquiry

“…Pre-service teachers' dispositions, seen as a combination of their beliefs about the nature of and attitudes towards the learning of mathematics (Cooke, 2015), have a pertinent influence on their initial teaching strategies and practices. Beswick (2012) has linked Ernest's (1989) three categories of teachers' beliefs about the nature and learning of mathematics to Van Zoest, Jones and Thornton's (1994) views on the teaching of mathematics. Her connection (Beswick, 2012, p. 129-130) firstly reveals that if mathematics is seen as "an accumulation of facts, skills and rules" (Ernest, 1989, p. 250), learning is typically viewed as a passive reception of knowledge and teaching will then primarily focus on content and optimal student achievement.…”