Exploring Changes in Pre-service Elementary Teachers' Mathematical Beliefs

Research literature (e.g., Thompson, 1992) suggests that teachers' beliefs about the nature of mathematics provide a strong indicator of their future teaching practices. Moreover, current reform efforts (e.g., NCTM,2000) ask teachers to lead mathematical explorations that allow their own students to construct mathematics. Understanding prospective teachers' mathematical beliefs and the circumstances under which these beliefs might be changed is therefore critical to teacher educators. In this paper we describe the culture of a mathematics content course for prospective elementary teachers that is designed to provide participants with authentic mathematical experiences and to foster autonomous mathematical behaviors. Using both survey and interview data, we explored participants' beliefs about the nature of mathematical behavior both at the commencement and at the completion of the course. We argue that the participants' beliefs became more supportive of autonomous behaviors during the course. We report that students attributed changes in beliefs to specific classroom social norms and sociomathematical norms that included facets of work on “big” problems with underlying structures, a broadening in the acceptable methods of solving problems, a focus on explanation and argument, and the opportunity to generate mathematics as a classroom community.