ABSTRACT
In his An Evaluation Guidebook: A Set of Practical Guidelines for the Educational Evaluator (1972), W. J. Popham argues strongly for a behavioural objectives model of teaching and learning, an approach that has had a considerable influence on the field of curriculum, culminating in the development of a national curriculum in the United Kingdom in the 1990s and similar policy initiatives round the world. Though educational theorists such as Popham embraced a technicist model of curriculum inherent in the specification of behavioural objectives, other curriculum theorists associated with this approach argued for weaker versions. Ralph Tyler (1950), for example, argued that specifying objectives was the only logical way of determining learning experiences. However, he did not subscribe to the view that they could be broken down into thousands of detailed educational sub-purposes, because he felt that this would unnecessarily restrict the teacher, and overwhelm their capacity to use them.
