An exploratory study on students’ beliefs about mathematics as a socio-cultural process

There is a great interest to make the classroom a ‘community of inquiry’. How students prepared for this? How students perceive mathematics? Is it a social fact for them? In the present paper we report an exploratory study aimed at investing around these points. A considerable part of the study is inspired by the idea that the ‘sense of history’ allows perceiving mathematics as an experience to be lived at the interior of a civilisation and thus this sense induces the perception of mathematics as a social fact. The study is based on a closed questionnaire administered to 288 students aged about 13. We discuss findings and possible implications for the classroom.