There is broad acceptance that mathematics teachers' beliefs about the nature of mathematics influence the ways in which they teach the subject. It is also recognised that mathematics as practised in typical school classrooms is different from the mathematical activity of mathematicians. This paper presents case studies of two secondary mathematics teachers, one experienced and the other relatively new to teaching, and considers their beliefs about the nature of mathematics, as a discipline and as a school subject. Possible origins and future developments of the structures of their belief systems are discussed along with implications of such structures for their practice. It is suggested that beliefs about mathematics can usefully be considered in terms of a matrix that accommodates the possibility of differing views of school mathematics and the discipline.

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This paper reports the findings of a study that sought to identify particular centrally held beliefs of secondary mathematics teachers that underpinned the establishment of classroom environments that were consistent with the principles of constructivism. The nine crucial beliefs identified were held by one or other of two teachers and emerged from teacher and student surveys, interviews with the teachers and classroom observations. As is the case with all beliefs, these beliefs were contextually bound but since the contexts in which they applied were broader than particular classrooms it is argued that they may be generalisable to other contexts and even predictive of teachers likely to create similar classroom environments.

As the high-end form of a smart education system, the smart campus has received increasing research attention over the world. Owing to the multidisciplinary nature of the smart campus, the existing research is mostly one-ended on either the state-or-the-art technologies or the innovative education concepts but lacks a deep fusion view on them and omits the smart campus implication on other smart city domains. This study highlights the interdisciplinary view on smart campus. Based on an integral review on the supporting technologies and existing smart campus propositions, a human-centred learning-oriented smart campus is envisaged, defined and framed up, primarily aiming at meeting stakeholders' interests and elevating educational performance in pace of the technology development, as well as discussing the interdisciplinary factors that either promote or constrain the smart campus revolution. The expected contribution throughout this study is to provide a benchmark reference of a smart campus for international educational providers, government, and technological companies providing such services.

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In this article, we report on the use of a teacher profiling instrument with 62 middle school teachers at the start of a 3-year professional learning programme. The instrument was designed to assess the aspects of teachers' knowledge identified by Shulman (1987) refined by Ball et al. (2008) and extended to include teachers' confidence to use and teach various topics in the middle school mathematics curriculum and their beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning. Based on a hierarchical coding of items, the application of the partial credit Rasch model revealed that the profile items were measuring a single underlying construct and suggested that the various facets of teacher knowledge develop together. We describe the characteristics of four levels of the hierarchical construct measuring teacher knowledge and understanding for teaching mathematics in the middle years of schooling, and discuss the unique affordances of a holistic view of teacher knowledge in contrast to considerations of multiple knowledge categories.