Practices and Beliefs in Mistake-Handling Activities

Although psychological theories assign to mistakes a fundamental role in the learning process and suggest ways to deal with them, only few studies have analyzed ways teacher-student interactions surrounding mistakes occur in actual classroom settings. This study focuses on such analysis. The data include a sample of 30 Italian and 30 U.S. videotaped eighth-grade mathematics lessons.  The differences observed in Italian and U.S. lessons are interpreted as a complex interplay of two elements: beliefs about learning and culturally-specific instructional practices.