This chapter talks about mainly how to obtain objectives or a purpose. Tyler focused on the importance of educational objectives. But the question is, how I can state an objective? Listing topics, concepts and generalizations are excellent ways to state an objective, teachers must be careful at the time of selecting objectives because they must be a guidance in teaching. However, the use of objectives help teachers to have a support every time they have doubts from the students and that is mainly one of the most important reasons why objectives are essential. The educational purpose is one of the starting points to select content, material, how to develop procedures and the preparation of the tests. Tyler said that many educational programs lacked clarity and meaningfulness in their objectives; this was evident through conversations with students as well as teachers. Student responses about what they were expected to be learning were often “I’m supposed to learn enough to pass the tests” or “I have to take it if I’m going to go to college. Objectives can be obtained in such different ways and correctly by the use of different stances:
Progressive stance: Study of the child’s interests and problems by providing selecting objectives. Educational Philosopher Stance: Educational Philosophy in order to select objectives. Essentialist Stance: Cultural heritage to select objectives. Socialist Stance: Analyst of contemporary society for selecting objectives. Ralph W. Tyler Stance: "no single source of information is adequate to provide a basis for wise and comprehensive decisions about the objectives of the school".
It is also really important to study the learners in this case your students. In this way, you will be able to identify their needs and behavior. Physical needs; social needs and integrative needs. Students will actively engage in learning if the subject is interesting to them. Education programs are not defined in terms of purposes and as a result students learning progress is not successful. The educational objectives “are important in planning an educational program, conducting it, appraising it, improving it, and explaining it to the appropriate public”. Specialists are criticized for their objectives being too specialized for a large number of students with different needs. Educational philosophers, on the contrary, believe that the primary mission of schools is to transmit the basic values that have been generated from comprehensive philosophic studies. When you study the learner you must consider finding the present status of the student and comparing the status to look for needs. Identifying needs is important due to the fact you find your students interests. You can use as a method observation and interviews. When you become a teacher your students become a type of child for you, in order to achieve objectives you must study your students outside school, from students health to religion and family. Psychology of learning is essential because it helps teachers to distinguish changes of our students that can harm or help their learning process. Outcomes are very common in experiences of learning and this is why psychology of learning is also the key of stating objectives. At the end of this chapter, the author suggests that attention must be given to the needs and interest of the learner, the needs of society, and the knowledge of the subject matter.
This chapter talks about how the essential means of education are the experiences provided, not the things to which the student is exposed. What are learning experiences based on? Normally there are based on the interaction between the student and the environment they react with inside the school. Actually this interaction is seen with the behavior of the student that can be active or passive, here the teacher identify if the student is learning by what the teacher explain. It is really important as my point of view of this chapter, how important is the teacher’s understanding of the topic, the background of the students can help the teacher to predict outcomes and provide a correct feedback because it is common for a teacher having students with the same age and grade in the class but with different experiences in the past with a subject, example with English. The teacher can provide students with different opportunities in order they achieve their educational objective, also the teacher is able to motivate the students during the process of reaching their objective. There are three generalizations that Tyler suggested for aiding the classroom teacher into an educational objective: 1) Students must implement educational goals. 2) Teaching goals can be derived from the needs of students by identifying the patterns of behavior which will help students meet these needs. 3) The patterns of behavior thus identified are appropriate teaching goals, if they are consistent with the educational philosophy of the school and are capable of being learned in the school. In order to select correctly objectives the teacher should involve the learning experiences of the student. However, a learning experience can lead to different outcomes and this is why the teacher should be careful of the “Side - effects”. Some experiences have the same objective and can be used to attain the same objective. Learning experiences are important in order to: • Develop thinking skills: They will develop inductive, deductive and logical thinking. • Acquire information: They will learn experiences in order to develop knowledge about certain topics. • Develop social attitudes: The most common attitudes developed in people are the assimilation from the environment, emotional effects from experiences, as well with the traumatic experiences and the direct intellectual process. • Develop interests: This will help students to determinate what they do the most. The teacher is able to see their interests and the results will come from several sources the teacher is able to study.
How can learning experiences be organized for effective Instruction?
First of all we need to know the role of organization in learning experiences, there are two types organization: the vertical organization that is based on learning experiences organized over the time and the horizontal organization that it is based on learning experiences organized from one area to another. The purpose of educational experiences is producing a cumulative effect but they must be organized in order they reinforce each other. The relationship of educational experiences are examined from one to another and there are also two types: vertical (compare two same courses but different level) and horizontal (compare two different courses but same level). The author also made a research on how contemporary life could affect or help deriving objectives and the end up with two main arguments in favor of this research. 1) “Educators have long accepted a large share of the responsibility for helping young people learn to live in their society” 2) He found that the student was “much more likely to apply his learning when he recognized the similarity between the situations he encountered in life and the school situation in which his learning took place” Every time you as a teacher try to have a criteria for effective organization: There are three criteria need to be met in order to create effective learning experiences 1. Continuity: train a single skill within a specific time frame. 2. Sequence: gradually increase the difficulty level. 3. Integration: put the specific skill into the big picture, ask yourself, how it can be related to other disciplines? One of the most important steps of the organized learning experiences is having a good structure. A good teacher always involve different elements in teaching. The main organizing principles are: Being chronological. Increase range of activities. Use always a description followed by an analysis. Developing illustrations There is an important organizing structure the teacher must follow:
Highest Level Specific subjects. Broad fields. Core curriculum and undifferentiated structure.
Intermediate Level Courses organized in sequences. Courses designed as a semester/year unit and have little relation with each other.
Lowest Level Daily lessons. Topic Unit
The process of planning a unit of organization must be carried out while the units are being used and the teacher is in charge to motivate the student in order they participate in the planning. One way to motivate them is doing activities increasing the motivation. The teacher must agree upon the general framework of organization, the principles, the structure, having flexible backups and designing activities in order to achieve the teacher-student collaboration.
Evaluation is a process that assess whether or not the objectives are realized. It should redefine the objectives and evaluate the condition in which students are able to demonstrate what they have learned. The purpose of evaluation is to check that the plans for learning experiences are functioning to guide the teacher in producing the outcomes that are desired. With evaluation the teacher will be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the plan and by this time the teacher will be able to determinate if the curriculum is effective or if it needs improvement. Tyler believes that "test" is only one of the many types of evaluation. As a matter of fact, questionnaire, observation, interview, sample collection, and data analysis are other ways of conducting evaluation. Evaluation normally have an influence on the guidance of the student and the type of evaluation done. The procedure of evaluation must include:   
Evidence about the kinds of behavior implied in the educational objectives. Analysis that served as the basis of planning the learning experiences. Content areas where indicates where the knowledge should be sampled.
How an evaluation instrument should be constructed? 1. Determine objectives. 2. Identify situations that give the students the chance to express the behavior implied in the educational objectives. 3. Determine units or terms used for summaries. 4. Using instruments to perform evaluation: objectivity, reliability and validity. In how to use the result of evaluation, Tyler suggests that the outcome of evaluations should not be simply interpreted as scores. Instead, the evaluation of a student should be multidimensional, which reflects the entire process of student's learning. At the end of this chapter Tyler suggested some advices for objectives at the process of evaluation. 1. To prepare students to be specialists in a subject field. 2. To provide general education for many people, most of whom will not become specialist in any field. 3. To prepare persons for an occupation which requires the use of some of the contents from one or more subject fields.
At this point of the book we have seen the major problems of planning a program with the respective objectives using the student’s needs. At the moment of creating a curriculum the teacher must take into consideration the best choices for the student. Curriculum must be an effective instrument for the school and in order it succeed the entire staff of the school must work on it, with the use of philosophy and psychology. Tyler maintained that getting educational objectives from the three sources would produce a long list of objectives. It is important to consider the different objectives. It is really important also to have consistency among the objectives in order to avoid any confusion and conflicts. The author recommended proposed that educational philosophy must address fundamental questions such as: 1. Should the educated man adjust to society, should he accept the social order as it is, or should he attempt to improve the society in which he lives? 2. Should the school seek to develop young people who will fit into the present society as it is, or does the school have a revolutionary mission to develop young people who will seek to improve the society? 3. Should there be a different education for different classes of society? 4. Should public school education be aimed primarily at the general education of the citizen, or should it be aimed at specific vocational preparation? It is important to remember from the author that human behaviors tend to fall into one of three domains: cognitive/thinking, affective/feeling, or psychomotor/acting. Tyler illustrated that an objective calling for appreciation could mean, “‘knowing or recognizing the worth of certain works of art, music or literature’”. This definition for appreciation would seem to fall under the cognitive domain. On the other hand, if the school recognized appreciation as “‘responding emotionally to aesthetic characteristics in certain works of art, music, or literature, one would tend to classify this objective within the affective domain. In the area of affective domains, Tyler offered two important principles. 1.
Political Principle: The function of the school in a democratic society is to help the student gain the means for increasing independence in judgment and action, and not to urge him to adopt particular doctrines or views. 2. Ethical Principle: each individual has a right to privacy not to be invaded by the school. In this way, schools needed to ensure objectives falling within the affective domain do not infringe upon the rights of the individual required the individual to confirm to any preconceived values or behaviors.