An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of New Turkish Primary School Curriculum in Practice.

The aim of this study is to determine the opinions of primary school teachers about the implementation and effectiveness of the new primary school curriculum that was conducted in eight cities during the 2004-2005 academic year. For that aim, a 24-item Likert-type scale, composed of four sub-scales, was developed and administered to 124 teachers working in five pilot schools in Diyarbakır downtown for the validity and reliability analyses. The reliability of the scale was tested through Cronbach Alpha (0,92), Spearman-Brown (0,85) and Guttman (0,85) and the scale was found to be reliable. The sub-scales were named learning environment, knowing the curriculum, adopting the curriculum, and implementing the curriculum. The scale, then, was administered to 982 teachers working in 8 other cities where the new curriculum was conducted. The aim was to determine whether the learning environment in the pilot schools was suitable for the new curriculum. To what extent the teachers knew the new curriculum, adopted and used it in terms of city, student number and gender variables were also studied. Results were discussed in relation to previous curriculum applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]