The 1930s:
Behavioral Objectives and Formative Evaluation

Influences on this period:

• The Great Depression affected education in terms of funding, students, and resources.
• The Progressive Movement in education

This period was characterized by slow progress toward the evolution of instructional development.

The 8 year study plan by Ralph Tyler was a major milestone in specifying general objectives for education, and behavioral objectives were being shaped. The study was designed in response to postwar pressures to revise the prevailing college prep high school curriculum in order to meet the needs of increasing numbers of students. The study confirmed that objectives could be clarified if written in terms of student behaviors.

Formative evaluation was used for the first time during the study.

Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers" describes a general purpose computer (1936).

H. G. Wells writes about accessing information in his book, World Brain (1938):

A World Encyclopaedia no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared. It would be in continual correspondence with every university, every research institution, every competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the world. It would develop a directorate and a staff of men of its own type, specialized editors and summarists. They would be very important and distinguished men in the new world. This Encyclopaedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network.

More information:

• Cognition and Learning in the 1930s

Readings:

	The Question of Certainty by John Dewey (1929) Chapter II: Philosophy's Search for the Immutable http://werple.net.au/~gaffcam/ phil/dewey.htm
	World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia by H.G. Wells Contribution to the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937 http://art-bin.com/art/obrain.html