Borg (4. How Do Teachers Have Cognitions?

To begin, the term teacher cognition, according to Borg (2003), refers to the unobservable cognitive dimension of teaching: what the teachers know, believe, and think. The assumptions on which this concept is based are now largely uncontested. These assumptions include the idea that teachers are active, thinking decision-makers who make instructional choices by drawing on complex, practically-oriented, personalised, and context-sensitive networks of knowledge, thoughts, and beliefs. Key questions addressed in this field include the following: a) what do teachers have cognitions about? b) how do these cognitions develop? c) how do they interact with teachers learning? and d) how do they interact with classroom practice?
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Only few from those assumptions about teachers’ beliefs, which are crucial in analyzing the present study, are presented in this part. According to him, beliefs are formed early and tend to self-perpetuate, persevering even against contradictions caused by reason, time, schooling, or experience. Individuals develop a belief system that houses all the beliefs acquired through the process of cultural transmission. Also, the belief system has an adaptive function in helping individuals define and understand the world and themselves. Moreover, thought processes may well be precursors to and creators of belief, but the filtering effect of belief structures ultimately screens, redefines, distorts, or reshapes subsequent thinking and information processing. Epistemological beliefs play a key role in knowledge interpretation and cognitive monitoring. Consequently, belief substructures, such as educational beliefs, must be understood in terms of their connections not only to each other but also to other, perhaps more central, beliefs in the system. Psychologists usually refer to these substructures as attitudes and values. Beliefs are instrumental in defining tasks and selecting the cognitive tools with which to interpret, plan, and make decisions regarding such tasks; hence, they play a critical role in defining behavior and organizing knowledge and information. Lastly, individuals' beliefs strongly affect their behavior (p.