Beliefs of primary teachers about mathematics and its teaching and learning : views from Singapore, Philippines, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia

![CDATA[The authors have been working, separately as well as collaboratively, on the area of teachers’ beliefs about mathematics and its learning and teaching for many years. In this paper, they report on the use of one instrument to ascertain measures of the beliefs of a total of 1254 primary school teachers in a number of different cultural contexts. The stimulus for this combined, cross-cultural study has been the variations in results achieved by students in international studies such as the TIMSS and TIMSS-R and the strong evidence that teachers’ beliefs about mathematics and its learning and teaching play a critical role in determining how teachers facilitate their students’ learning. Hence, differences in teacher beliefs may be one reason for the measured differences in student achievement. The results of the study clearly show that teachers’ beliefs in all of the samples can be adequately described in terms of the statements in the survey and that there are marked differences in response to these statements across the different groups of teachers.]]