Literature Index

This paper discusses the role of mathematics teachers' beliefs and their impact on<br>curriculum reform. It is argued that teachers' beliefs about the teaching and<br>learning mathematics are critical in determining the pace of curriculum reform.<br>Educational change is a complex process in which teachers hold strong beliefs<br>about the quality and the process of innovation. Curriculum implementation may<br>only occur through sufferance as many teachers are suspicious of reform in<br>mathematics education given its equivocal success over the past decades. It is not<br>surprising then that many teachers, when they come to enact the curriculum in<br>their classes, rely more on their own beliefs than on current trends in pedagogy.<br>These beliefs, conservative as they might be, have their own rationality in the<br>practical and daily nature of the teaching profession, and in the compelling<br>influence of educational systems from which these teachers are paradoxically the<br>social product. The literature indicates that many of these teachers hold<br>behaviourist beliefs, a fact that has strong implications for the success of<br>constructivist-oriented curriculum reform. In general, studies of teachers'<br>pedagogical beliefs reveal the extreme complexity of bringing about educational<br>change, and largely explains the failure of many past reform endeavours.