Students' beliefs and attitudes towards mathematics teaching and learning is the focus of the study described in this paper. Some preliminary results from research carried out in Norway in 2005 are given, which focus on first year students in upper secondary school. The answers from the ninth grade students in 2005 are briefly compared with students' responses from 1995 when corresponding data was collected within the KIM project in Norway. Both of these studies use a questionnaire elaborated in 1995. Some of the aspects related to a similar study amongst Estonian students, that will take place in spring 2006, are also discussed.

The teachers in this study are participants in the LCM1- (Learning Communities in Mathematics) project run at Agder University College. The project emphasises the development of communities of teachers and researchers focused on inquiry in mathematics and teaching. This paper deals with a well-planned lesson in an eleventh grade class in a Norwegian upper secondary school. We will present data that illustrate how the teachers intervened to reach certain goals that had been identified through the planning process. These interventions identified discourses, which showed that there was a discrepancy between how the teachers interpreted and used a certain word for a mathematical concept and how the students interpreted the same word. Our findings illuminate common challenges faced when trying to build a community of inquiry in the classroom.

Teacher education is meant to be research based and many teacher educators try in different ways to achieve this aim also for the school practice during education. We report on an experiment to design a new form for inclusion of research during practice. A group of student teachers have during their fifth semester carried out interviews with pupils. The classroom observations and interviews take their starting point in data that have been collected in other parts of a larger ongoing research project. The students transcribe, analyse and report their results in written essays. We will describe the design, its results and evaluation. The theoretical framework used is the model for teacher competencies by Niss [1]. The research questions in the paper are (1) ‘In what ways is it meaningful to involve student teachers during practice in a research project?' and (2) ‘What kind of elements of learning do the students perceive in such a situation?'