It has been reported (Aagaard & Skidmore, 2004; Sikorski et al., 2002) that only a minority of college students actually read the course textbook in preparation for examinations. Although professors widely lament students' propensity to ignore the carefully chosen textbooks, research specifically investigating why this phenomenon occurs is…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways instructors' subject matter beliefs regarding mathematics shape their courses in a community college environment. Data were collected and analysed from instructors' philosophical definitions of mathematics and observations of teaching episodes using a constructivist grounded theory research design.…