Tyler’s Principle Relevance

Tyler’s theory was based on four fundamental questions:

1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?

2. What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes?

3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?

4. How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?

There are 4 major limitations of Tyler’s approach:

The first, is that it limits teacher interactions that could be used to achieve certain behavioural changes, and since the goal of this approach “is not to have the instructor perform certain activities but to bring about significant changes in the students’ pattern of behaviour, it becomes important to recognize that any statements of objectives of the school should be a statement of changes to take place in the students.”

Secondly, this approach also focuses on the “parts rather than the whole.” I can relate to this because Tyler’s approach has significant importance in the sciences. A lot of the times I learn things that I don’t know how they relate to what we’re doing in the class or what real-world implications they have (ex. Calculus in terms of real-world application).

Thirdly, different teachers in the classroom have different objectives/goals in the classroom largely depending on what subject they are teaching. For example, science classes have no problem working with individual objectives but English classes’ goals are often tying everything together and how things relate to each other which creates a problem.

Lastly, unanticipated results are a problem because the overlooked results can influence what the student learns or affects how they learn.

The benefits of approaching curriculum theory this way is that it has “considerable organizing power.” By forming different behavioral objectives, it provides “a clear notion of outcome so that content and method may be organized and the results evaluated.” This approach definitely has particular significance in the science/math category based on how things are broken down and the processes of individual formulae are determined. Because there are so many branches in the field of science, the basics are covered, especially in high school and introductory classes, and as many topics are covered in order to get a taste of a wide variety of the subject. The mark received is generally how you show how well you know the processes of what is learnt, but it is more for how well you will be able to handle further progression of the course.