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A perceived lack of engagement of many students in middle years mathematics classes provides a challenge for educators. In this article we report a project that investigated students' perceptions of the extent to which their own efforts influence their achievement at mathematics and their life opportunities. We conducted 2 hour interviews with over 50 students, as well as collecting other data. The results suggest that a student's orientation to learning mathematics is not predicted by their achievement. Even students who were confident, successful and persistent exhibited short-term goals. It seems that classroom culture may be an important determinant of under-participation in schooling.

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Schematic models have been used extel~sively in educational research to represent relationships between variables diagrammatically, including the interrelationships between factors associated with teachers' beliefs and practices. A review of such models informed the development of a new model that was used to plan an investigation into primary school teachers' problem-solving beliefs and practices. (hi the basis of the findings from the research, the model was revised to h~clude the important variable of prior mathematics learning, as well as a repositioning of the influence of teaching experiences in classrooms.

Insights into teachers' planning of mathematics reported here were gathered as part of a broader project examining aspects of the implementation of the Australian curriculum in mathematics (and English). In particular, the responses of primary and secondary teachers to a survey of various aspects of decisions that inform their use of curriculum documents and assessment processes to plan their teaching are discussed. Teachers appear to have a clear idea of the overall topic as the focus of their planning, but they are less clear when asked to articulate the important ideas in that topic. While there is considerable diversity in the processes that teachers use for planning and in the ways that assessment information informs that planning, a consistent theme was that teachers make active decisions at all stages in the planning process. Teachers use a variety of assessment data in various ways, but these are not typically data extracted from external assessments. This research has important Math Ed Res J (2013) 25:457-480