Introduction

Beliefs can be conceptualized as an “individual’s judgment of the truth or falsity of a proposition” (Pajares, 1992, p. 316) or “as a set of interrelated notions” (McAlpine, Eriks-Brophy, & Crago, 1996, p. 392), or “as a set of conceptual representations which store general knowledge of objects, people and events, and their characteristic relationships” (Hermans, van Braak, & Van Keer, 2008, p. 128). As noted by Fives and Buehl (2012), defi ning beliefs is not always the challenge in this fi eld (although it is a challenge), but fi nding consistency across these defi nitions so that one can come to a meaningful, pragmatic, and warranted conceptualization of the research seems to be a more epic quest for scholars in this fi eld: A quest the authors of the International Handbook of Research on Teachers’ Beliefs have undertaken with zeal