Mathematics teachers’ beliefs as components of their practical knowledge

It is widely recognized that practical knowledge for teaching, i.e. the knowledge used by teachers to carry out their work, is a compound of different elements. It feeds from and into underlying beliefs about content and pedagogy, as well as empirical beliefs, i.e. beliefs shaped by personal experience. Due their importance, it is necessary to investigate on teachers’ beliefs. In this paper I reports the findings of an open questionnaire administered to 20 mathematics teachers attending an in-service course. The subject investigated is “beliefs on mathematics and its teaching”. The aim of this study is to outline elements that contribute to clarify the net of relations linking the components of the practical knowledge