Understanding the Tyler rationale: Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction in historical context

This historical study attempts to contribute to our understanding of the widely recognized and widely critiqued Tyler rationale for the development of curriculum and instruction by explaining it in the historical context in which Ralph Tyler developed it, by tracing its origins in Tyler’s work, and by reconstructing a history of the course, Education 360, Tyler taught at the University of Chicago. This analysis found that Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, which emerged from Tyler’s field work with teachers and professors and his conception of evaluation, is best understood as a study guide that Tyler prepared for the use of his students in the course by that name that he taught during the 1940s and 1950s. This analysis found that Tyler’s rationale was remarkable in its time for its embrace of three curriculum sources, its conception of education essentially as experience, its approach to assessment as evaluation rather than as measurement, its approach to curriculum development as a problem-solving process, and its commitment to teacher participation in the development of curriculum and instruction.

RATIONALE AND TEACHING OBJECTIVES FOR A CANADIAN ENGINEERING ETHICS GAME

This paper uses Tyler’s rationale as a framework for analyzing the teaching objectives surrounding the design of a video game to teach Canadian engineering ethics.The two keys challenges in this area are defining what should be taught in engineering ethics and then how it is evaluated in order to demonstrate improved understanding. Traditionally, engineering ethics courses are taught as either codes of conduct, or based on case studies with very constrained courses. The evaluation that follows then uses the Defining Issues Test (DIT) or an instructor’s evaluation.However, the above methods could be improved by focusing on engineering ethics as a situated, embedded, and applied discipline. That is, one in which decisions are made as part of a team, embedded in a workplace whose goals will likely be in conflict with the engineers, and whose outcomes are unknown at the time decisions are made.By using a serious game in which the players are protagonists affords us the opportunity to present thick cases with multiple decision points and opportunities for players to demonstrate their ethical bias. Additionally, the progress of players and their interactions with non-playing characters can reveal information on their assumptions and ethical bias.