The Beliefs/Practice Connection in Broadly Defined Contexts

The findings of a study that examined the connection between the beliefs of secondary mathematics teachers and their classroom practices are reported in this article. Classroom practice was defined in terms of the extent to which classroom environments could be characterised as constructivist. Cluster analysis was used to group teachers according to their responses to a beliefs instrument and to group their classes according to their average responses to a classroom environment survey. Associations between the two sets of clusters were found, suggesting some consistency between broad relatively de-contextualised teacher beliefs and student perceptions considered at the whole class level.