Curriculum Studies in Relation to the Field of Instruction

Conversations that link curriculum and instruction are as old as the institutions that educate students. Decisions about what to teach have implications for how to teach. The origin of the notion of instruction as a production system can be traced to efforts during the early decades of the 20th century to apply industrial scientific management to education. In later years, instruction as a production system was related to the doctrine of behaviorism and to systems analysis and accountability. By mid century, with focus on accountability, evaluation became a central practice in the field of instruction and in the practice of curriculum development. Ralph W. Tyler, perhaps one of the most influential educators in evaluation, influenced policy and set guidelines for the expenditure of government funds. His work helped to codify educational evaluation as it pertained to aligning measurement and testing with specific educational purposes. By this time it was customary for scholars and practitioners to consider curriculum as a design problem. The well-known Tyler Rationale was articulated in Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction as the way to consolidate parameters for analysis of the internal components of curriculum construction—goals, implementation, and evaluation. Curriculum planners were guided to consider a curriculum program that consisted of purposes, learning experiences, organization and evaluation. Program evaluation, then, was intended to determine the effective aspects of the program and to revise the areas that were not effective. In his book, Tyler described learning as taking place through the action of the student, not what the teacher does.

By the late 1960s, the fields of curriculum and instruction had fused in the guise of the objectives movement. With the large-scale entry of the federal government, first through the 1958 National Defense Education Act, the National Science Foundation, and subsequently by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, government linked with private funding sources to forge a powerful force in curriculum and instruction policy. The economic force effectively overshadowed individual child-centered education. The demands of the funding agencies for accountability influenced the emphasis on standardized treatments and evaluation. The dominant camp of curriculum scholars was representative of evaluators such as W. James Popham, who worked from a means–end perspective that required curriculum developers to clearly state objectives of a program prior to deciding its content and organization. Under their influence, in the 1970s thousands of U.S. teachers learned to write behavioral objectives using standardized and tightly controlled formats. The practice continues today as it serves the growing trend toward standardized achievement testing that has given impetus to conceiving curriculum in terms of test results.

By the decade of the 1970s, the voices of curriculum scholars whose work followed different scholarly perspectives began to be heard. Curriculum development as the prime focus had lost dominance. Federal monies were running out and the evaluators were leaving the curriculum field. Writing behavioral objectives had become the centrality of curriculum development and instructional design for at least two decades. However, as the reconceptualist movement matured, the two practices began to identify as different fields. These curriculum scholars had become the dominant force in the American Educational Research Association's Division B Curriculum and Objectives. In 1982, Elliot Eisner was the head of the curriculum division and oversaw the proposal to change the name of Division B to Curriculum Studies. This change was a clear signal that the field of curriculum studies had severed its relationship to both curriculum development and instructional design.

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