ABSTRACT
In 1997 Mike Askew, Margaret Brown, Dylan Wiliam and colleagues from King’s College in London explored the links between teachers’ practices, beliefs and knowledge and pupil learning outcomes in mathematics. They interviewed and observed 90 teachers and 2000 pupils. The full results are available in the book E ective Teachers of Numeracy: Report of a study carried out for the Teacher Training Agency (King’s College). In this book the authors
identified three sets of beliefs which they suggested were important when understanding the impact of teacher beliefs on effective teaching of numeracy. These were:
� Connectionist – a connectionist teacher values pupils’ methods and teaching strategies with an emphasis on establishing connections within mathematics. This means that learners are able to see the links between the different areas of mathematics they are engaged with and can see the ‘big picture’ rather than view mathematics as a set of separate skills to be learnt in isolation from each other.
