Inferring pre-service teachers’ beliefs from their commentary on knowledge items

This paper explores the entailment of teachers’ beliefs in pedagogical content knowledge for mathematics teaching. It reports interview data from one pre-service teacher discussing his responses to a multiple-choice item designed to assess an aspect of pedagogical content knowledge. The responses were analysed in two stages as the basis for inferring beliefs that appeared to underlie them. The results suggest that the pre-service teacher’s choices relied heavily on his beliefs, and problematise the distinction between beliefs and pedagogical content knowledge.