Science Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices: Issues, Implications and Research Agenda

The study of teachers’ beliefs forms part of the process of understanding how teachers
conceptualize their work which in turn is important to the understanding of teachers’
practices and their decisions in the classroom. A growing body of research argues that
teachers’ beliefs should be studied within a framework that is aware of the influence of
culture. These studies also argue that teachers’ beliefs and practices cannot be examined
out of context. This shows that the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and their
practices is complex and context dependent. Some researchers have found consistencies
between teachers’ beliefs and their practices whilst others have found inconsistencies.
The purpose of this paper is to present an argument about the relationship of
teachers’ beliefs and practices and to find out frameworks of understanding the consistency
and inconsistency of this relationship. In this paper, I explore the nature of teachers’
beliefs. Then, I discuss how teachers’ beliefs have been formed. Also, I will argue
the relationship between knowledge and beliefs. Researchers’ key vision of the relationship
between beliefs and knowledge was that “whether knowledge directs beliefs
or beliefs leads to knowledge. I will argue that the relationship among beliefs, knowledge
and practices are intertwined. Then, I present sociocultural perspectives to explain
the consistency and inconsistency between teachers’ beliefs and practices. I will
follow these perspectives by presenting sources of forming teacher’s beliefs which will
lead to a discussion about potentials of changing teachers’ beliefs.