Prior to the 1980s, Turkey experienced a period of vicious political polarisation and even violent conflicts. The 1980 coup administration strived to reach an agreement regarding nationalism, religion, and Kemalism. Following the military coup of 1980, the Social Studies course was abandoned in secondary schools in 1985 and the National History,…

New educational curricula are regularly put into practice worldwide; and the issues related to curriculum design are frequently discussed from a pedagogical perspective. However, the processes involved in preparing a statewide English as a foreign language (EFL) curriculum are rarely elaborated from an inside view. As the experiences of program…

How can assessment and evaluation policies work together more effectively to improve student outcomes in primary and secondary schools? The country reports in this series provide, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing evaluation and assessment policy to identify improvements that can be made to enhance…

This publication aims to capture how policies and measures relating to citizenship education have evolved over recent years in European countries. It focuses on the following areas which are integral to the provision of citizenship education: (1) Curriculum aims, approaches and organisation; (2) Student and parent participation in school…

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of in-service courses conducted by the Ministry of National Education in order to inform teachers about the changes introduced by the new primary and secondary school curricula. The study also aims to reveal whether these changes have entered the classrooms based on the teachers' views of the INSET…

The purpose of this paper is analyzing the new Science and Technology curriculum, which was declared as the new primary school curriculum in August 2004 by Turkish Minister of Education (MoE), based on Posner's (2004) curriculum analysis framework. The written curriculum was examined and the findings were supported with a variety of resources…

This paper is structured in two sections. The first examines views of mathematical abstraction in two broad categories: empiricist and dialectical accounts. It documents the difficulties involved in and explores the potentialities of both accounts. Then it outlines a recent model which takes a dialectical materialist approach to abstraction in…

Previous research has documented a need for the development of a sex education programme in Turkish schools in terms of adolescence readiness and the presence of misconceptions regarding critical aspects of sexual issues. Currently no school-based sex education is available for Turkish adolescents. This paper presents the development of a…

The aim of this study is to develop a new curriculum, which meets the standards of today's computer literacy and enables the students to apply the MS Excel program in their daily lives as a tool, for the spreadsheet courses in computer lessons in the 6th, 7th, 8th grades of the current curriculum of the Turkish Ministry of National Education,…

A new national curriculum in all subject areas is about to be introduced in elementary schools in Turkey. The new curriculum is based on a "Constructivist" approach. This discussion paper focuses on the new curriculum for English as a foreign language, noting that teachers need information about the philosophy of the new curriculum and…