Pedagogical Beliefs About the Specific Difficulties of Learning Mathematics from the Perspective of Special Education Teachers in a Public School in Chile

This research aims to describe the pedagogical beliefs of differential educators on the specific difficulties of learning mathematics. This study employed a qualitative design with an ethnographic approach, in which four special education teachers participated, and the in-depth interview and participant observation were used as data collection instruments. The qualitative content analysis was used as a technical analysis of the discursive corpus obtained. Among the most relevant findings are the specific difficulties of learning mathematics that correspond to an intrinsic condition to the student, and the origin of these difficulties that are associated with both a health problem and inadequate methodologies of teaching mathematics. Likewise, it is proposed that students who have these difficulties have a problem at the level of mathematical reasoning, which prevents them from progressing in the learning of this school subject