The curricular importance of mathematics: a comparison of English and Hungarian teachers’ espoused beliefs

Abstract

This paper reports an interview study of 45 English and 10 Hungarian teachers of mathematics. The semi‐structured interviews focused on the teachers’ professional life‐histories and invited them to discuss their beliefs about the necessary subject content for the teaching and learning of mathematics. Substantial differences emerged between the two cohorts, which accord with well‐defined national perspectives on education in general and mathematics education in particular. They reflect, at national rather than individual levels, the expectations of the curricular frameworks within which teachers operate. English teachers tended to view mathematics as applicable number and the means by which learners are prepared for a world beyond school. Hungarian teachers privileged mathematics as problem‐solving and logical thinking.

Keywords:

• comparative education
• curriculum
• England
• Hungary
• mathematics teachers
• teachers’ beliefs

Notes

1. The interviews were semi‐structured and invited the teachers to describe the manner in which their careers had developed and to discuss key episodes that had informed their professional lives. Interviews, which were conducted in the colleagues’ schools by researchers from each teacher’s country, were tape‐recorded and transcribed. Transcripts were mailed to teachers to obtain their agreement as to content, although not one was queried. Interviews lasted between 30–40 minutes. Subsequent to their interviews, the Hungarian transcripts were translated into English by English‐speaking Hungarian colleagues; the scale of the study meant that no funds were available for back translation. Confidence in the veracity of the translations was facilitated by a number of factors. The two teams had collaborated for several years prior to this project and had developed a shared vocabulary of mathematics classroom activity and an understanding of each other’s context. During this time I spent more than 6 weeks observing mathematics lessons in Budapest and was able to acquire sufficient linguistic sensitivity to be able to recognize, for example, the distinctive nature of the words gyakorlt (exercise), feladet (task) and probléma (problem). However, despite a belief that the translations were robust and that a shared vocabulary was, indeed, operational, substantial care was taken with regard to the analysis of the data and discussion of the results. It is important to note that there are few pronouns in Hungarian, so an explicit acknowledgement of the gender of a verb’s subject is rare. Consequently, Hungarians translating into English tend to report in the masculine. Therefore, unless the context made gender unambiguous, Hungarian utterances have been re‐written to present a gender‐neutral perspective.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Andrews

Paul Andrews is a senior lecturer in mathematics education at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 2PQ, UK; e‐mail: [email protected]. His current research interests are in comparative mathematics education and the use of video technology in research and teaching.