Tyler's Four Questions and the Role of Objectives
Tyler’s Four Questions and the Role of Objectives
The four basic questions
- What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
- What educational experiences can be provided to attain them?
- How can these experiences be effectively organized?
- How can we determine whether the purposes are being attained?
The role of objectives
- They are the criteria for selecting materials, identifying content, developing methods, and preparing tests.
- Every part of an educational program is a means to achieve the basic purposes.
- To study a program intelligently, you must first know its objectives.
The whole of curriculum development can be put as four questions. They are simple to state and hard to answer well, and the rest of this guide is built around them. The first question, about purposes, comes first for a reason: until you know what a school is trying to achieve, nothing else can be judged.
The four basic questions
The basic questions of curriculum development are:
- What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
- What educational experiences can be provided to attain these purposes?
- How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
- How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?
These map onto the four halves of the second part of this guide: defining purposes, selecting experiences, organizing them, and evaluating them. This chapter and the next five take the first question and work it out in full.
Purposes, experiences to attain them, organizing those experiences, and evaluating attainment
What purposes should the school pursue, what experiences attain them, how to organize the experiences, and how to tell whether the purposes are met. The first question is about objectives.
The role of objectives
Objectives are the school’s answer to the first question, and they do heavy work. Once set, they become the criteria for nearly every later decision. They guide the selection of materials, the identification of content, the development of teaching methods, and the preparation of tests and exams. A test is good if it measures the objectives; content is right if it serves them.
This reveals how the parts of an educational program relate. Materials, content, methods, and tests are not ends in themselves. They are all means to achieve the basic educational purposes. The objectives are the ends; everything else is a means to reach them.
A practical consequence follows. To study a program systematically and intelligently, you must first know clearly what educational objectives it aims at. Without that, you are looking at a pile of activities with no way to tell whether they are working. Knowing the objectives is what lets you judge everything else.
Objectives are the criteria that make every other part judgeable
Materials, content, methods, and tests are all means to the objectives. Without knowing the objectives, a program is just activities with no way to tell whether any of it is working.
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