The development of new curriculum to overcome the students` difficulties in persiving the concept of limit and constructing the relationship between the concept of limit and the other mathematical concepts

The purpose of the study is to design a constructivist learning environmentwhich can provide a contribution to construct the limit concept and to determine theeffects of constructivist learning environment to the students? achievements, attitudestowards mathematics, improving of the mathematical thinking, approaches aboutlearning to the world, learning to learn, learning scientific event, learning tocommunicate and critical voices.The study is a quasi-experimental research conducted with 60 studentmathematics teachers at their first year attending Calculus course at Buca EducationFaculty in Dokuz Eylül University. The experiment group consists of 12 girls and 19boys, and control group consists of 11 girls and 18 boys. The control group wastaught the limit concept through traditional ways and the experiment group learnedthe limit concept within constructivist learning environment. The study was startedby selecting two classes comprising an equal number of students (statisticallyequivalent). The experimental study was continued six weeks. Students inexperiment and control conditions received 72 hour lessons. The experiment groupwas divided into nine sub-groups formed of four students.Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect the data. Thedata were collected by means of the Mathematics Attitudes Scale, ConstructivistLearning Environment Survey, Worksheets Relation to Limit Concept, ProblemsAssessing Mathematical Thinking, students? diaries, project task and interviews. Thequantitative data were assessed to statistical programs and the quantitative data wereevaluated by reading, coding, grouping, and interpreting. Some of the qualitative datawere scored.The data collected in this study illustrated that the constructivist learningenvironment designed by the researcher could provide the versatile positivecontributions to acquire and learn the limit concept. The experimental groupparticipants? approaches about learning to the world, learning to learn, learning tocommunicate mathematically were more positive than the control group participantsand two groups deferred statistically in this domains. On the other hand, difference inattitudes towards mathematics was not statistically significant. But the students?attitudes in the experiment group were higher than the students? attitudes in thecontrol group.The analyses of the data indicated that students in groups related to the limitconcepts and the real world in some points. It was also found out that they did notstrained the defining limit concept with different aspects and giving meaning to thelimit concept by means of geometrical representations. However it was determinedthat they strained proving the existence of the limit of a function at one point byusing the epsilon-delta approach. The ability of the mathematical thinking of theexperiment group appeared to be better than the other group and it was foundstatistical significant differences in favor of the experimental group. In addition, itwas said that the learning environment provided much contributions in terms ofsocial aspects.Key words: constructivism, limit concept, constructivist learning environment,assessment-evaluation approach, mathematical thinking.