Evaluation and Educational Objectives

The propositions advanced and defended in this article are: (1) that it is more urgent for educators to reach agreement on their general purposes and goals than to specify in detail the outcomes they seek; (2) that insistance on detailed statements of educational objectives is questionable; (3) that teachers should be more concerned with developing a pupil's cognitive resources than with changing his behavior; (4) that criterion‐referenced measures should supplement, not supplant norm‐referenced measures; and (5) that conventional test statistics are appropriate for criterion‐referenced tests if they are based on appropriate test responses.