Tyler, Ralph W.

(b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois; d. 1994, San Diego, California). Ph.D., University of Chicago; M.S., University of Nebraska; B.S., Doane College.

At the time of his death, Tyler was a visiting scholar at the School of Education at Stanford University and had stayed active well into his 80s, advising teachers and administrators across the country on how to set objectives that would encourage the best teaching and learning within their schools. Tyler held faculty positions at the University of North Carolina, The Ohio State University, and the University of Chicago, where he was also Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst; an advisor on evaluation and curriculum in Ghana, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, and Sweden; and held 22 honorary doctoral degrees. From 1953 to 1967, he was Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. In 1969, he became President of the System Development Foundation in San Francisco, which supported research in the information sciences.

Tyler's influence on the discipline of education, including curriculum, instruction, and evaluation, is [Page 425]remarkable. During the early part of the 1900s, testing as a way in which to measure constructs such as intelligence or achievement was spreading rapidly. Testing as the sole approach to evaluating educational programs was threatening the way high school programs were being developed and delivered. Tyler questioned the appropriateness of such tests for the purpose of program or pupil evaluation. In 1934, he became Director of Evaluation of the Eight-Year Study sponsored by the Progressive Education Association. This longitudinal study, which compared the experiences of students in a variety of high school programs, is credited for widely influencing changes in curriculum development and educational evaluation methods; both were seen as integral parts of the cycle of teaching and learning. The basic principle Tyler developed is that there are a variety of ways to evaluate pupil progress and achievement, and the evaluation approach should be appropriate to the behavior or outcome to be evaluated. This meant determining the purpose of these programs right at the start. It was during this study that Tyler first conceptualized the objectives-based approach to educational evaluation, an approach that continues to influence curriculum development and evaluation today.

Tyler published more than 700 articles and 16 books, but he is best known for Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, first published in 1949. In this book, he lays out the four basic principles of objectives-based evaluation: (a) defining appropriate learning objectives, (b) establishing useful learning experiences, (c) organizing learning experiences so that they have the maximum cumulative effect, and (d) evaluating the curriculum and revising those aspects that did not prove to be effective.

Tyler was an adviser on education to six U.S. presidents. He served on an impressive range of committees, including the National Council for the Education of Disadvantaged Children and the Science Research Associates, and he was appointed to the Task Force on Older Americans under President Lyndon Johnson. He was the first President of the National Academy of Education. In the 1960s, he was asked by the Carnegie Corporation to chair the committee that eventually developed and initiated the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Tyler helped set guidelines for the expenditure of federal funds and contributed to the policies established in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. His work was, and remains, influential.

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