Since the traditional curricula do not address the needs of society any more, many countries as well as Turkey have initiated curriculum reform in physics education. A new physics curriculum has been developed in Turkey in 2007. Being student-centered and context-based are the main differences of the new curriculum from the previous one.  In spite of a little change in the concepts, innovations in teaching and assessment methods and the perspective of the curriculum are noticeable.

     As Cuban (1993) mentioned about mismatch between the intended, the implemented and the attained curriculum, it is essential to keep the implemented curriculum as close as possible to the intended one. The mismatch is attributed to the fact that teachers work on more limited goals and objectives than the curriculum developers put forward (Handal, & Herrington 2003). Moreover, studies about physics teachers‘ beliefs are limited in number which may help curriculum developers take into account teachers in the curriculum development process. Curriculum change relies on the basic assumption that teachers will, machine-like; alter their behaviors because they were simply told what was good for them (Grant, Hiebert, & Wearne, 1994). However, teachers have a critical role in the curriculum reform effort. They are expected to change instruction, teaching and learning process, classrooms in the way the developers proposed. On the other hand, teachers are one of the major obstacles of implementation part as being to be convinced to change their beliefs and the teaching way they are used to. It’s worthwhile to investigate teachers’ beliefs about the curriculum which they are expected to implement, that not only to understand this paradox but also to help curriculum reform effort.

     The primary purpose of this study is to identify and describe the secondary physics teachers' beliefs about curriculum design. Next, it’s intended to understand how their beliefs about curriculum influence the way that they implement the intended curriculum. Teacher beliefs about curriculum design may be defined as decisions about objectives, content, organization, teaching strategies, learning activities and instructional assessment. Although there are researches in the literature stating the close relationship between teachers’ belief and the way how they teach (Brickhouse, 1990; Cronin-Jones, 1991; Lumpe, Haney, & Czerniak, 1998), it’s necessary to reduce it to physics teachers in order to directly affect physics curriculum improvement studies. To understand how the beliefs of teachers affect their teaching behavior will help curriculum developers to find the ways to encourage teachers to put into the curriculum action with decreased problems. Because, if a teacher does not believe that a particular curriculum design is valuable, he or she will not put it into practice willingly. The teacher may even adjust the intended curriculum to make it more similar to his or her own belief system and classroom context. Hence, in order to improve physics education in schools, research on physics teachers' beliefs about the design of new curriculum in Turkey is essential.

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