Teachers’ Beliefs about Curriculum Knowledge

Abstract

　　The purpose of this study is to describe how do teacher’s beliefs about curriculum knowledge work in the specific contexts, such as planning and practice through analyzing grade four mathematics class. From epistemological perspective, belief about curriculum knowledge is defined as value judgement based on curriculum knowledge, which appears as an action. In accordance with this definition, this study focuses on decision making situations and picks up three specific cases in the contexts with gaps between lesson plan and actual lesson; (1) students interests differs from the aim of today’s lesson, (2) students disagree to the answer teacher expected, (3) teacher picks up student’s idea which is not written on the lesson plan. The researcher used semi-constructed interview with video clip showing three specific scenes. The protocol was analyzed through identifying teacher’s interpretation, perception, decision making, and observable behavior.

　　The topic is the area of quadrilaterals. The aim is to let the students think how to find the area using the number of right triangles. We find three kinds of curriculum knowledge, which are curriculum knowledge about the sequence and relevance among grades and domains, knowledge about teaching materials (right triangles), and knowledge about conception of quadrilaterals and area. The results showed that teacher’s value judgement is strongly related to these knowledge. However, what curriculum knowledge influence on value judgement directly is knowledge about teaching materials, which are the function of a teaching material, values and goodness of a teaching material.