ABSTRACT
Teachers hold many different kinds of beliefs simultaneously. They hold beliefs about knowledge (epistemology), their students (e.g., attributions, locus of control, motivation, test anxiety, culture, intelligence), and other beliefs about students and themselves (e.g., self-efficacy, self-worth, self-concept, self-esteem, and sense of agency). Teachers also hold beliefs about their subject matter (content), how to teach (pedagogy), and about the many moral and ethical dilemmas and societal issues that affect their teaching (e.g., politics, poverty, economics). Pajares (1992) identified a long list of other terms used interchangeably in the literature on teachers’ beliefs: attitudes, values, judgments, axioms, opinions, guiding images, ideology, perceptions, conceptions, conceptual systems, dispositions, implicit theories, explicit theories, personal theories, personal practical knowledge, and perspectives. Twenty years later, Fives and Buehl (2012) stated that “the lack of cohesion and clear definitions has limited the explanatory and predictive potential of teachers’ beliefs” (p. 471).
