New curricula have been developed and are being implemented for primary and secondary schools with ongoing changes since 2004 in Turkey. The idea behind
these curricular reforms is to change the curriculum from a subject centered to a learner centered one and change the pedagogies from a behaviorism to more constructivism. The purpose of the curriculum reform is to change considerably the focus and content of the whole national curriculum. The basic objectives of the curriculum reform in Turkey are;
• to reduce the amount of content and number of concepts
• to arrange the units thematically
• to develop nine core competencies across the curriculum
• to move from a teacher-centered didactic model to a student-centered constructivist model
• to incorporate information communications technologies (ICT) into instruction
• to monitor student progress through formative assessment
• to move away from traditional assessment of recall, and introduce authentic assessment
• to enhance citizenship education (Board of Education(BoE), 2005) One of the curricula started to be developed since 2004 is Primary School mathematic curriculum. The curriculum has been developed under the guidance of a committee consisted of academicians, teachers, and educational specialist. Further, feedbacks and opinions were gathered from other teachers, parents, students, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The Curricula developed for 1st to 5th grade students were firstly pilot tested in 120 pilot schools in 2004. One year after piloting, it was revised based on feedback obtained through the pilot administration, and implemented nation-wide. During this process, textbooks and instructional materials for grades 1st – 5th have been designed for use. Similarly, the math curriculum for grades 6th to 8th have been still developed and implemented in pilot schools gradually. Furthermore, basic education course schedule is being redesigned (Karip, 2005). As a following to the attempts in primary level, on-going reform attempts has been also reflected in secondary schools (changes in the courses and time of the secondary education) and universities (new courses were added and changes are done in the content of existing courses) as well. In Turkey, exploratory teaching and memorization are still dominant in mathematics classrooms. Previous mathematics curriculum was based on behaviorist theory. The recently developed elementary school