Abstract
In this paper we examine the relationship between teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and instructional practices based on a study with 495 Chinese pre-service mathematics teachers. The results indicate that Chinese pre-service mathematics teachers tend to hold mixed beliefs about the nature of mathematics, and a constructivist view about mathematics teaching and learning, and that they are inclined to report that their teaching is inquiry-oriented. Mathematical content knowledge (MCK) and mathematics pedagogical content knowledge (MPCK) were found not to correlate with the teachers’ self-reported instructional practice, in contrast to pre-service mathematics teachers’ beliefs, which showed a stronger association with their self-reported inquiry-oriented instructional practice. Moreover, pre-service teachers’ dynamic beliefs about the nature of mathematics, and constructivist beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning, acted as mediators between pre-service mathematics teachers’ MCK, MPCK and instructional practice respectively.
Highlights
The high mathematics achievement of Eastern, currently especially Chinese, students identified in large-scale international studies has attracted considerable attention in Germany 5 Centre for Educational Measurement, University of Oslo, Postboks 1161, Blindern, 0318 Oslo, Norway researchers and policy makers all over the world for several years
From a social and cultural point of view, findings identified in previous studies conducted in Western contexts may not necessarily, or at least not fully, reflect the actual relationship of Chinese mathematics teacher knowledge, beliefs and instructional practices. In view of this gap in the literature, using the theoretical framework developed in the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) and the involvement of a large number of pre-service mathematics teachers at secondary school level in China, the aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between their knowledge, beliefs and practice
The mean score of the static beliefs is greater than 3, which indicates that the participants in this study tend to hold mixed beliefs about the nature of mathematics
Summary
The high mathematics achievement of Eastern, currently especially Chinese, students identified in large-scale international studies (see the most recent results of the PISA study; OECD 2019) has attracted considerable attention in Germany 5 Centre for Educational Measurement, University of Oslo, Postboks 1161, Blindern, 0318 Oslo, Norway researchers and policy makers all over the world for several years. Other researchers compared mathematics instruction in China with that from Western countries (e.g., USA and Australia) under the assumption that mathematics instruction influences students’ mathematics learning more directly (e.g., Schleppenbach et al 2007; Xu and Clarke 2013, 2019). In these cross-national comparative studies, it was identified that Chinese mathematics teachers tend to structure lessons, respond to students’ errors and interact with students differently. Namely teacher knowledge and beliefs, have been widely
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