curriculum. Their work loads seem to be lessened in implementing new curriculum.
The active role taken from the teachers has been given to the students. Students have been placed at the centre of the education. In other words, students have been activated. They have undertaken active roles in the classroom. In this way, they have realized their skills and capacities, as claimed by teachers. This helps the student develop self-awareness. Students have been started to execute their duties by living, doing, interpreting and logically thinking. The teachers seem to have difficulty in arranging the physical classroom environment since they are so many students in the classroom. In spite of crowded classrooms, newly developed curriculum provides the students with more interaction and cooperation by offering group work and discussion activities. It seems that the interaction between student and student, and teacher and students has been encouraged with new mathematics curriculum. As mentioned by the teachers, the interaction enables the students to communicate, cooperate (with) and help each other and teacher. Looking at the content of the course in the new curriculum, some topics were taken from course content and some (e.g. symmetry, pattern construction, and prediction …etc) were enhanced. Further, some topics that were abstract to the students were taken out as well. In the implementation process, since there were no mathematics books written in line with new approaches on which the new math curriculum based, the teachers were generally prone to use internet web site constructed for new mathematics curriculum by the Board of Education. The teachers believe that the topics in new primary school mathematics curriculum are more in line with the students’ development level. Since the students have not received the knowledge from the teachers passively and they have reached knowledge by doing, living, and searching, the students have constructed their own knowledge by themselves. As also indicated by the teachers, the knowledge constructed and thus gained are more permanent because the students have opportunities to solve problems and to do activities, and also to relate theoretical knowledge with their real life. In this respect, the attainments, called objectives in previous curriculum, related to units and topics are comprehended in a process. Teachers believe in that students would be more successful with the new curriculum. Students’ outcomes were assessed by diversity of evaluation procedures. Since instruction and evaluation is tied in new curriculum, students’ performance was evaluated in each step of the instruction. The evaluation goes hand in hand with instruction. The evaluation procedures used focus upon process-oriented methods as well as product-oriented methods. However, the crucial problem in implementing new curriculum that the teachers faced in relation to grading students’ performance is the inadequate use of rubric. In addition, since, as teacher indicated, the time allocated for the evaluation was not substantial, they have difficulty in evaluating students’ performance.