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Submitted By momoflexgirl
Words 797
Pages 4
Each year globally many millions of dollars are spent on training. It would seem reasonable to establish just how effective this training has been if only to help justify the budget. Evaluation techniques are not new, indeed the most influential early work on evaluation was performed in the USA during the 1940s by Tyler. Probably the most important aspect of Ralph W Tyler’s work was the realisation of the importance of objectives in designing an effective school curriculum. This early methodology can be defined as the scientific/experimental approach. The model emphasised the importance of knowing the educational standards of the individuals in the control group before the new education initiative took place and then determining the change that had taken place by measuring the difference in attainment after the educational intervention was completed. In other words the aim was to determine the effectiveness of the training by scientific means on the level of performance of the individual. Although there have been some critics of this methodology it has proved to be valuable in that organisations have been able to quantify the relationship between their corporate objectives (often expressed as key performance indicators (KPIs) today) and the training aims and objectives. The main criticism of the scientific/experimental approach is that the methodology is unable to take into account the unexpected or unintentional learning that can take place within a dynamic and changing learning environment. Those readers who can remember reading about the original, and now famous Hawthorne experiments to determine the effects of illumination levels on production held at the Western Electric plant in Cicero, Illinois in the 1920’s and the later experiments also conducted by the National Research Council showed that human behaviour is indeed difficult to quantify exactly.

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