Epistemologies, beliefs and conceptions of mathematics teaching and learning : the theory, and what is manifested in mathematics teacher's practices in England, France and Germany

This paper firstly explores the issues raised in the literature concerning epistemologies, beliefs and conceptions of mathematics and its teaching and learning. Secondly, it analyses the ways in which mathematics teachers’ classroom practices in England, France and Germany reflect teachers’ beliefs and conception of mathematics and its teaching and learning. Drawing on a recent study of mathematics teachers’ work in England, France and Germany, the findings suggest that teachers’ beliefs and conceptions are manifested in their practices and can be traced back to philosophical traditions of the three countries, to epistemological and educational trends of mathematics and mathematics education, and to personal constructions. It is suggested that teachers’ pedagogical styles are a personal response to a set of assumptions about the subject and its teaching and learning, to a set of educational and philosophical traditions, and to a set of institutional and societal constraints. Thus, it is argued that teachers’ pedagogies need to be analysed and understood in terms of a larger cultural context and in relation to teachers’ conceptions and beliefs, and that a lack of such understanding is likely to inhibit the process of change at all levels of the system

Pupils' attitude towards mathematics : a comparative study of Norwegian and English secondory students. Beliefs and Beyond: Affecting the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics.

Comparing English and Norwegian pupils’ attitude towards mathematics, in this article I develop a deeper understanding of the factors that may shape and influence ‘pupil attitude towards mathematics’, and argue for it as a socio-cultural construct embedded in and shaped by students’ environment and context in which they learn mathematics. The theoretical framework leans on work by Zan and Di Martino (The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast, Monograph 3, pp. 157–168, 2007) to elicit Norwegian and English pupils’ attitude of mathematics as they experience it in their respective environments. Whilst there were differences which could be seen to be accounted for by differently ‘figured’ environments, there are also many similarities. It was interesting to see that, albeit based on a small statistical sample, in both countries students had a positive attitude towards mathematics in year 7/8, which dropped in year 9, and increased again in years 10/11. This result could be explained and compared with other larger scale studies (e.g. Hodgen et al. in Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics. 29(3), 2009). The analysis of pupils’ qualitative comments (and classroom observations) suggested seven factors that appeared to influence pupil attitude most, and these had ‘superficial’ commonalities, but the perceptions that appeared to underpin these mentions were different, and could be linked to the environments of learning mathematics in their respective classrooms. In summary, it is claimed that it is not enough to identify the factors that may shape and influence pupil attitude, but more importantly, to study how these are ‘lived’ by pupils, what meanings are made in classrooms and in different contexts, and how the factors interrelate and can be understood

Supporting or alienating students during their transition to higher education: mathematically relevant trajectories in two educational contexts

Drawing on our projects of transition to mathematically demanding subjects in UK Higher Education and an extension of this work in Norway, we explore the measurement of various pedagogical and learning aspects of students’ transition into Higher Education. We focus on experiences of engagement, and alienation, which we claim can offer an enhanced view on student learning experiences. Our analysis is based on longitudinal surveys of students entering different programmes in UK (N = 1778), and Norwegian (N = 721) universities. Validation is performed within the Rasch measurement framework, which indicated problems in establishing measurement invariance. Cross-sectional analysis of the two datasets, then, revealed consistent patterns in the process of alienation from mathematics as well as some systemic mechanisms that can help alleviate that