Research into pedagogical 'belief statements' held by pre-ITE students

In this paper I will present the results from a small-scale research project undertaken with both a group of pre-Initial Teacher Education (ITE) Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC) students and a group of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) Professional Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) students at the University of East London (UEL) between January 2008 and July 2009. The emerging results are in their early stages of development and are a continuation and development of the work addressed in two previous papers; one presented to the British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference in September 2008 (Clarke 2008a) and another presented to the British Society for Research into the Learning of Mathematics (BSRLM) conference in November 2008 (Clarke 2008b). The work appears to show some evidence that participation in a MEC, and hence exposure to a variety of teaching approaches, does change "beliefs" concerning the way in which participants think mathematics should be taught. Once changed, these changed "beliefs" appear to be robust.

Citation:
Clarke, J. (2009) ‘Research into pedagogical 'belief statements' held by pre-ITE students’ British Educational Research Association Annual Conference (BERA 09) University of Manchester, 2nd-5th September. Leeds: Education-line..