Measuring changes in mathematics teachers' belief systems

Abstract

Although research in mathematics education has yielded a great number of results on mathematics teachers’ beliefs in recent decades, it is still an open question as to whether these teachers’ beliefs are stable or not. However, since mathematics teachers’ beliefs are perceived to be the default of their classroom practices, it is important to gain insight into these beliefs and into their development. In this paper, we contribute to this field of research by providing an approach designed to analyse a change in teachers’ belief systems. We study a sample of 20 prospective teachers during their first practical experience. We analyse the structure of teachers’ belief systems with interviews and a questionnaire set twice within one year. To analyse development of these teachers’ belief systems, we assigned the young teachers of the first and second survey to clusters that were developed in a former study and re-analysed for our purposes here. Our results show considerable changes in mathematics teachers’ central beliefs during their first practical experience. However, a general pattern of belief changes is not found.

KEYWORDS:

• Beliefs
• teachers’ beliefs
• belief change
• belief development
• belief system
• prospective teachers
• mathematics teachers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.