A decade before the conference that Jerome Bruner writes about, Ralph Tyler (1949) published
his classic text on curriculum development. It was organized around four questions:
1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2. How can learning experiences that are likely to be useful in attaining these objectives be
selected?
3. How can learning experiences be organized for effective instruction?
4. How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated?
This short volume, written to help educational institutions engage in curriculum building, called
for the application of four corresponding principles in the development of any curriculum:
defining goals, establishing corresponding learning experiences, organizing learning
experiences to have a cumulative effect, and evaluating outcomes. Tyler’s principles were the
accepted approach to curriculum development for almost 30 years, and they guide the essential
questions of curriculum development today, though they now are applied to newer ideas and
considerations that extend or reinterpret his principles.