Secondary Lenses on Learning:
Leadership for Mathematics Education
in Middle and High Schools - Survey
The BELIEFS Coding Scheme
The coding scheme for assessing administrators’ open responses to the questions about the classroom scenario (A Classroom Reflection) assesses the pedagogical lens through which administrators interpreted the teaching actions described in the scenario (BELIEFS coding scheme). Unlike the research described in the TMI elementary and middle school website, in this research on secondary administrators’ LCK we did not code the open responses to the classroom scenario for “math-in-use.” Nor did we develop a finer grain coding scheme for responses that were given the same belief score on the pre and the post tests – the so-called static scorers.
The BELIEFS coding scheme consists of 6 categories that span the continuum from a traditional, direct instruction position anchoring one end to a perspective at the other end in which instructional decisions are made by taking into account both the mathematical ideas of individual students and the assessment of the prevalent ideas within the class as a group. These categories are essentially the same as those used in coding the data in the TMI project, though the sample data is different because respondents wrote in response to a different classroom scenario. Though the categories are numbered from 1 to 6, we do not believe that they constitute an interval scale.