Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
Ralph W. Tyler’s(1902–1994) illustrious career in education resulted in major contributions to the policy and practice of American schooling. His influence was especially felt in the field of testing, where he transformed the idea of measurement into a grander concept that he called evaluation; in the field of curriculum, where he designed a rationale for curriculum planning in the realm of educational policy.
Ralph Winfred Tyler was born April 22, 1902, in Chicago, Illinois, and soon thereafter (1904) moved to Nebraska. In 1921, at the age of 19, Tyler received the A.B. degree from Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, and began teaching high school in Pierre, South Dakota. He obtained the A.M. degree from the University of Nebraska (1923) while working there as assistant supervisor of sciences (1922-1927). In 1927 Tyler received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago.
After starting his career in education as a science teacher in South Dakota, Tyler went to the University of Chicago to pursue a doctorate in educational psychology. His training with Charles Judd and W.W. Charters at Chicago led to a research focus on teaching and testing. Upon graduation in 1927, Tyler took an appointment at the University of North Carolina, where he worked with teachers in the state on improving curricula. In 1929 Tyler followed W. W. Charters to the Ohio State University (OSU). He joined a team of scholars directed by Charters at the university’s Bureau of Educational Research, taking the position of director of accomplishment testing in the bureau. He was hired to assist OSU faculty with the task of improving their teaching and increasing student retention at the university. In this capacity, he designed a number of path-breaking service studies. Tyler first coined the term evaluation as it pertained to schooling. Because of his early insistence on looking at evaluation as a matter of evidence tied to fundamental school purposes, Tyler could very well be considered one of the first proponents of what is now popularly known as portfolio assessment.
After serving as associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina (1927-1929), Tyler went to Ohio State University where he attained the rank of professor of education (1929-1938). It was around 1938 that he became nationally prominent due to his involvement in the Progressive Education related Eight Year Study (1933-1941), an investigation into secondary school curriculum requirements and their relationship to subsequent college success. In 1938 Tyler continued work on the Eight Year Study at the University of Chicago, where he was employed as chairman of the Department of Education (1938-1948), dean of social sciences (1948-1953), and university examiner (1938-1953). In 1953 Tyler became the first director of the Stanford, California-based Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, a position he held until his retirement in 1966.
Tyler’s reputation as an education expert grew with the publication of Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Because of the value Tyler placed on linking objectives to experience (instruction) and evaluation, he became known as the father of behavioural objectives. Often called the grandfather of curriculum design, Ralph W. Tyler was heavily influenced by Edward Thorndike, John Dewey, and the Progressive Education movement of the 1920s. Thorndike turned curriculum inquiry away from the relative values of different subjects to empirical studies of contemporary life .Dewey promoted the idea of incorporating student interests when designing learning objectives and activities. Tyler targeted the student’s emotions, feelings and beliefs as well as the intellect.
Tyler also exercised enormous influence as an educational adviser. Tyler also started his career as an education adviser in the White House. In 1952 he offered U.S. President Harry Truman advice on reforming the curriculum at the service academies. Under Eisenhower, he chaired the President’s Conference on Children and Youth. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration used Tyler to help shape its education bills, most notably the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, in which he was given the responsibility of writing the section on the development of regional educational research laboratories. In the late 1960s Tyler took on the job of designing the assessment measures for the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which are federally mandated criterion-reference tests used to gauge national achievement in various disciplines and skill domains. He formally retired in 1967, taking on the position of director emeritus and trustee to the centre and itinerant educational consultant. Tyler also played a significant role in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and its “Fundamental Curriculum Decisions.” (1983).
The curriculum rationale
Ralph Tyler’s most useful works is Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, a course syllabus used by generations of college students as a basic reference for curriculum and instruction development.
Tyler stated his curriculum rationale in terms of four questions published in 1949 Tyler his curriculum rationale in terms of four questions that, he argued, must be answered in developing any curriculum plan of instruction
1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2. What educational experiences can be provided that will likely attain these purposes?
3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
4. How can we determine whether the purposes are being attained?
These questions may be reformulated into a four-step process: stating objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing learning experiences, and evaluating the curriculum. The Tyler rationale is essentially an explication of these steps.
The rationale also highlighted an important set of factors to be weighed against the questions. Tyler believed that the structure of the school curriculum also had to be responsive to three central factors that represent the main elements of an educative experience:
(1) the nature of the learner (developmental factors, learner interests and needs, life experiences, etc.);
(2) the values and aims of society (democratizing principles, values and attitudes); and
(3) knowledge of subject matter (what is believed to be worthy and usable knowledge).
In answering the four questions and in designing school experience for children, curriculum developers had to screen their judgments through the three factors.
This reasoning reveals the cryptic distinction between learning specific bits and pieces of information and understanding the unifying concepts that underlie the information. . Tyler asserted that this is the process through which meaningful education occurs, his caveat being that one should not confuse “being educated” with simply “knowing facts. Indeed, learning involves not just talking about subjects but a demonstration of what one can do with those subjects. A truly educated person, Tyler seems to say, has not only acquired certain factual information but has also modified his/her behaviour patterns as a result. (Thus, many educators identify him with the concept of behavioural objectives.) These behaviour patterns enable the educated person to adequately cope with many situations, not just those under which the learning took place.
Tyler’s rationale has been criticized for being overtly managerial and linear in its position on the school curriculum. Some critics have characterized it as outdated and a theoretical, suitable only to administrators keen on controlling the school curriculum in ways that are unresponsive to teachers and learners. The most well-known criticism of the rationale makes the argument that the rationale is historically wedded to social efficiency traditions.
Tylor’s Curriculum Development Model
Ralph W. Tyler: Behavioural Model Probably the most frequently quoted theoretical formulation in the field of curriculum has been that published by Ralph Tyler in 1949.Tyler model is deductive; it proceed from the general (e.g., examining the needs of society) to the specific (e.g., specifying instructional objectives). Furthermore, the model is linear; it involve a certain order or sequence of steps from beginning to end. Linear models need not be immutable sequences of steps, however. Curriculum makers can exercise judgment as to entry points and interrelationships of components of the model. Moreover, the model is prescriptive; it suggest what ought to be done and what is done by many curriculum developers.
It is also unlike the curriculum of social reconstruction, it is more “society cantered.” This model positioned the school curriculum as a tool for improving community life. Therefore, the needs and problems of the social-issue is the source of the main curriculum. Tyler (1990) holds that there are three forms of resources that can be used to formulate the purpose of education, i.e. individuals (children as students), contemporary life, and expert consideration of field of study.
This development curriculum model means more of how to design a curriculum in accordance with the goals and the mission of an educational institution. According to Taylor (1990) there are four fundamental things that are considered to develop a curriculum, which is the purpose of education who wants to be achieved, learning experience to achieve the goals, learning organizing experiences, and evaluation.
Defining Objectives of the Learning Experience
Tyler remarks, “The progressive emphasizes the importance of studying the child to find out what kinds of interests he has, what problems he encounters, what purposes he has in mind. The progressive sees this information as providing the basic source for selecting objectives” . Tyler was interested in how learning related to the issues of society, and believed studies of contemporary life provided information for learning objectives. He defines the learning objectives in terms of knowledge, communication skills, social and ethical perspective, quantitative and analytical skills, and cognitive/taxonomy. He proposes that educational objectives originate from three sources: studies of society, studies of learners, and subject-matter specialists. These data systematically collected and analyzed form the basis of initial objectives to be tested for their attainability and their efforts in real curriculum situations. The tentative objectives from the three sources are filtered through two screens: the school’s educational philosophy and knowledge of the psychology of learning, which results in a final set of educational objectives
Defining learning experience.
Once the first step of stating and refining objectives is accomplished, the rationale proceeds through the steps of selection and organization of learning experiences as the means for achieving outcomes, and, finally, evaluating in terms of those learning outcomes. The term “learning experience” refers to the interaction between the learner and the external conditions in the environment to which he can react. Tyler argues that the term “learning experience” is not the same as the content with a course which deals nor activities performed by the teacher. Learning takes place through the active behaviour of the student; it is what he does that he learns not what the teacher does. So, the learning experience of students refers to activities in the learning process. What should be asked in this experience is “what will be done and have been done by the students” not “what will be done and have been done by teachers.”
Tyler recognizes a problem in connection with the selection of learning experiences by a teacher . The problem is that by definition a learning experience is the interaction between a student and her environment. That is, a learning experience is to some degree a function of the perceptions, interests, and previous experiences of the student. Thus, a learning experience is not totally within the power of the teacher to select. Nevertheless, Tyler maintains that the teacher can control the learning experience through the manipulation of the environment, resulting in stimulating situations sufficient to evoke the desired kind of learning outcomes.
There are several principles in determining student learning experiences, which are: (a) students experience must be appropriate to the goals you want to achieve, (b) each learning experience must satisfy the students, (c) each design of student learning experience should involve students, and (d) in one learning experience, students can reach different objectives.
“The most difficult problem is setting up learning experiences to try to make interesting a type of activity which has become boring or distasteful to the student” . He stresses, “Students learn through exploration”. Tyler’s mentor, John Dewey, also advocated that teachers should encourage children to become actively engaged in discovering what the world is like . “No single learning experience has a very profound influence upon the learner,” remarks Tyler .
Organizing of Learning Activities for Attaining the Defined Objectives.
“Organization is seen as an important problem in curriculum development because it greatly influences the efficiency of instruction and the degree to which major educational changes are brought about in the learners,” asserts Tyler. He believes three major criteria are required in building organized learning experiences: Continuity, sequence, and integration. Students need concrete experiences to which the readings are meaningfully connected
Tyler maintains that there are two types of organizing learning experiences, which is organizing it vertically and horizontally. Organizing vertically, when the learning experience in a similar study in a different level. There are three criteria, according to Tyler in organizing learning experiences, which are: continuity, sequence, and integration. The principle of continuity means that the learning experience given should have continuity and it is needed to learning experience in advance.
Principles of content sequence means that the learning experience provided to students should pay attention to the level of student’s development. Learning experience given in class five should be different with learning experiences in the next class.
The principle of integration means that the learning experience provided to students must have a function and useful to obtain learning experience in other sectors. For example, learning experience in Arabic language must be able to get help learning experience in the field of other studies.
Evaluation and Assessment of the Learning Experiences
Evaluation is the process of determining to what extent the educational objectives are being realized by the curriculum. Stated another way, the statement of objectives not only serves as the basis for selecting and organizing the learning experiences, but also serves as a standard against which the program of curriculum and instruction is appraised. Thus, according to Tyler, curriculum evaluation is the process of matching initial expectations in the form of behavioural objectives with outcomes achieved by the learner.
There are two functions of evaluation. First, the evaluation used to obtain data on the educational goals achievement by the students (called the summative function). Second, the evaluation used to measure the effectiveness of the learning process (called the formative function).
The process of assessment is critical to Tyler’s Model and begins with the objectives of the educational program. . Curriculum evaluation is the process of matching initial expectations in the form of behavioural objectives with outcomes achieved by the learner. There are two aspects that need to be concerned with evaluation, namely: the evaluation should assess whether there have been changes in student behaviour in accordance with the goals of education which have been formulated, and evaluation ideally use more than one assessment tool in a certain time.
Tyler asserts, “The process of evaluation is essentially the process of determining to what extent the educational objectives are actually being realized by the program of curriculum and instruction” . Furthermore, he states, “Curriculum planning is a continuous process and that as materials and procedures are developed they are tried out, their results are appraised, their inadequacies identified, and suggested improvements indicated” . With his emphasis on the individual student Tyler believes that all evaluation must be guided by a purpose and be sensitive to the uniqueness of the individual being assessed.
Tyler largely determine what he attends to, and frequently what he does . Tyler states, “Education is a process of changing the behaviour patterns of people” . He values the individual learner.