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Pedagogical content beliefs: global, content domain-related and situation-specific components

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Abstract

Although teachers’ professional knowledge and instructional beliefs are known to have a variety of subcomponents, research on the structure and interrelations of these subcomponents is relatively scarce. This article presents some findings of a preliminary, quantitative empirical study examining the relationships between mathematics teachers’ views concerning specific classroom situations, their content domain-specific pedagogical content beliefs and their more global instruction-related beliefs. The findings suggest that global beliefs—in terms of cognitive constructivist or direct transmission views of teaching and learning, on the one hand, and beliefs about the stability of individual mathematical abilities, on the other—can impact teachers’ content domain-specific beliefs and their views related to videotaped classroom situations from introductory lessons on geometrical proof.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Stuttgart, Germany) for support of the study.

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Correspondence to Sebastian Kuntze.

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Kuntze, S. Pedagogical content beliefs: global, content domain-related and situation-specific components. Educ Stud Math 79, 273–292 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-011-9347-9

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