Ralph Tyler, the Tyler Rationale, and the Idea of Educational Evaluation
Authors: Hlebowitsh Peter 
Published: March 2021

Ralph Tyler’s long tenure in the field of curriculum studies began at the schoolhouse door where he first worked as a secondary school educator. Taking an analytical interest in understanding student learning and academic progress, Tyler entered a doctoral program at the University of Chicago in 1926. Because his advisor, Charles Judd, conducted work on the transfer of learning that pointed to the importance of developing general cognitive skills over highly specific ones, Tyler had an early practical handle on how to rethink his ideas on monitoring and documenting academic progress. Tyler recast the idea of pencil-and-paper testing into a broadened construct that could be best described as an evidence collection process, and the idea educational evaluation was born.

Tyler’s unique ideas on evaluation helped him to win an appointment as the Research Director of the Eight-Year Study in 1934, which provided him with a platform for testing his new approach. It also helped him to conceive of a new model for the development of the experimental curricula used in the schools of the Eight-Year Study—a model now famously known as the Tyler rationale. Tyler’s rationale aimed to organize the curriculum around several key functions including: (a) the identification of purposes; (b) the organization of instruction attendant to such purposes; and (c) the design of evaluation mechanisms used to determine whether the stated purposes have been attained. The rationale proved to be enormously popular and eventually emerged as a convention for curriculum development work. Several critics, unhappy with the behavioristic features of the rationale, claimed that the rationale was drawn from a social efficiency tradition that produced school experiences framed and controlled by a large number of atomized objectives. Some years later, criticism of the rationale went to the very heart of the curriculum studies field with assertions that alleged that the rationale had become a conceptual roadblock for the field, embodying a way of thinking about the curriculum that stunted the field’s possibility for vibrant theoretical gains.

Tyler did not engage these criticisms and instead moved forward with a line of administrative and consulting work. In 1948, he was appointed Dean to the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago, and later in 1952, he took on the position of Director of the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He also became a sought-after advisor on all matters of educational policy and practice, assisting several U.S. presidents on various matters related to educational policy, taking on a large number of international consultancies, and finding his way into the area of test development, working, for instance, with E. F. Lindquist on the first iterations of the General Education Diploma (GED) and serving as the chief architect for the design and development of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Ralph Tyler’s long career generated a remarkable legacy of achievements in education, not the least of which included a model for the development of a school curriculum that carried with it an entirely reimagined way of thinking about student progress. The centrality of his work to the normative dimensions of the school experience and the wide utility of his curriculum model helped to shape the conduct of the school in a progressive direction.