Peter Op 't Eynde

Framing Students’ Mathematics-Related Beliefs

Despite the general agreement among researchers today that students’ beliefs have an important influence on mathematical problem solving there is still a lack of clarity from a conceptual viewpoint. In this chapter we present a literature review of available categorizations or models of students’ beliefs related to mathematics learning and problem solving. These reveal that although they all cover a broad spectrum of relevant beliefs, there appears to be no consensus on the structure and the content of the relevant categories of students’ beliefs, A philosophical and psychological analysis of the nature and the structure of beliefs enables us to come to a deeper understanding of the development and the functioning of students’ beliefs and to clarify the relation between beliefs and knowledge. The insights developed through this analysis result in an elaborated and concrete definition of students’ mathematics-related beliefs and allow us to develop a theoretical framework that coherently integrates the major components of prevalent models of students’ beliefs. We differentiate between students’ beliefs about mathematics education, students’ beliefs about the self, and students’ beliefs about the social context, i.e., the class context.