Evaluation: when did 
                      it all begin? 
        •  The rise in systematic evaluation activity began in 
           the field of education in the late forties in the 
           US and later in the UK.
        •   Disappointed with the unprincipled and ad hoc 
           approach to curriculum development in the US, 
           Ralf Tyler in 1949 with the publication of his 
           book “The Basic Principles of Curriculum and 
           Instruction”, gave evaluation a prominent place in 
           the curriculum development process.  In this 
           book, Tyler proposed a systematic and simple 
           approach to curriculum planning.
        •  Tyler’s model was extremely influential and was 
           adopted in the US and in the UK in the 1950’s and 
           1960’s
       Tyler’s objectives 
       model
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                       Criticisms of the Tylerian 
                       model of evaluation
        •  The results of large scale evaluations in the 60’s 
           which adopted the Tylerian approach were quite 
           disappointing. 
        •  Stenhouse in 1975, as Director of the Humanities 
           Curriculum Project in the UK, expressed his 
           concerns with the Tylerian model. 
        •  “The objectives model of evaluation, may give us 
           an indication of whether objectives have been 
           achieved but gives us no indication of how these 
           objectives were achieved. It pays no attention to 
           the processes by which these objectives were 
           achieved; as such it does little or nothing to 
           improve the quality of teaching and learning”. 
                Move from product to 
                process…
          •  Stenhouse’s critique gave rise to a new 
             wave in the evaluation scene and led to the 
             development of an alternative approach to 
             curriculum evaluation which focused more 
             on the process of curriculum development 
             and relied on description and interpretation. 
          •  At the same time (late 60’s to late 70’s) a 
             plethora of models or approaches to 
             evaluation were developed... 
                            Evaluation in 
                            language teaching
          •  Within language education, the first evaluation 
             studies to be carried out were the so-called 
             methods comparison studies which set out to 
             compare the effectiveness of language teaching 
             methods following an experimental approach 
             much along the  lines set by the Tylerian 
             tradition. 
          •  As Alderson (1992:283) points out: 
          A common evaluation paradigm for language 
             education in the 1960’s and 1970’s was to 
             identify a suitable set of groups of learners, to 
             match them with appropriate control students, 
             to administer a treatment to the experimental 
             group and compare the results of such an 
             experiment with the outcomes of the control 
             group.