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Much comparative research into education-related beliefs has exploited questionnaires developed in one culture for use in another. This has been particularly the case in mathematics education, the focus of this paper. In so doing, researchers have tended to assume that translation alone is sufficient to warrant a reliable and valid instrument for cross-cultural research, prompting concerns that a number of necessary equivalences are unlikely to have been addressed. In this paper, we consider the nature of these equivalences before examining the literature of a different field, healthcare research, to synthesise an approach to instrument adaptation that is pragmatic but rigorous. Finally, we demonstrate how this pragmatic approach, incorporating extensive cognitive interviews, enabled us to adapt and refine a mathematics-related beliefs questionnaire, developed in Flanders, for use with students aged 14–15 in England and Spain. Analyses indicate that the instrument so developed is multidimensional, reliable and cross-culturally valid. Some implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the restructuring of education in England and Spain. Against a presumably homogeneous global streamlining of educational systems according to competition-driven goals, the comparison of teachers' work-lives and professional knowledge evidences a variety of experiences under-represented in discourses on global restructuring. Our argument highlights how in England political reforms have worked their way deep into the working lives of professionals, giving rise to a 'managerial' model of professionalism, whereas in Spain reforms are more loosely coupled with teachers' work, favoring a 'social service'-oriented model. However, despite the different professional ideals, teachers uniformly stressed the challenges they face were predominantly due to broader social transformations for which policy reforms provided few if any remedies. Our study emphasizes the variety of educational reforms and teachers' experiences in the European context and argues further educational change should be bound to the historical trajectory and the concrete needs of the professionals in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]