Goal analysis robert mager biography

Goal Analysis by Robert F. Mager

Having a goal and reaching the goal are two entirely different subjects. There are many books out there which teach a person how to have goals in their lives. This book tells a person step-by-step how to make goals and reach them. 

Many books talk about goals. This book shows how to write them. The problem with goals is the fact that many words are used which cannot be defined or are “fuzzy” in the words of the author. These “fuzzy” words prevent people from knowing what the goals are. What surprised this reviewer is how often people and organizations use these “fuzzy” words without knowing it. Goals need to contain words which define performances. The author spends time showing the difference (23-41).

Once the “fuzzies” are discovered and changed to performances, the author shares a five-step process to a goal analysis (44-86). This is followed by many examples from a variety of disciplines. Throughout the book, the author invites the reader to interact with the text. There are opportunities to write in the book and do activities to do what the author expects. These activities include: finding fuzzies (27-33), recognizing the differences between performances and abstractions (36-42), making goals describe ends rather than means (47-48), describing performances that a person does not do (62), practicing the steps of goal analysis (103-109), This interaction is necessary because the reviewer will have to do this goal analysis later. As a result, one has practiced before the actual dissertation. 

There is a chapter that deals with what to do after the goal analysis (125-127). In essence, once the goal is analyzed, one can determine which performances are currently working correctly, which of the non-occurring performances are due to skill deficiencies and which are due to other causes, and then one can plot the process on a chart. While this reviewer is familiar with flow charts, it was good t

American psychologist and author (1923–2020)

Robert Frank Mager [meɪgɜ:] (June 10, 1923 – May 23, 2020) was an American psychologist and author. Concerned with understanding and improving human performance, he is known for developing a framework for preparing learning objectives, and criterion referenced instruction (CRI), as well as addressing areas of goal orientation, student evaluation, student motivation, classroom environment, educational change, performance technology, and instructional design.

Personal life / biography

Robert Frank Mager was born in the summer of 1923 shortly before The Great Depression. As any other little boy, Mager had aspirations of becoming a fireman, policeman, detective, cowboy and even a rocketship pilot. Mager was picked-on in school. This was as a result of him being skipped from fourth grade to sixth grade. This made him one of the smallest in his class. To add insult to injury, in his time, being left-handed was considered a heinous act and often resulted in a sharp rap on the knuckles. Subsequently, Mager switched to writing with his right-hand.

Music also formed part of Mager's explorations as he jumped from one instrument to the other. At one time he played the violin, then the clarinet and even the saxophone. Eventually he found ‘his love’ the banjo, and has even been part of a banjo band. Mager's ‘true love’ his wife, is a professional classical musician.

He died in May 2020 at the age of 96.^&

A series of occasional posts celebrating people who helped to make behavior analysis what it is. Guest posts are always invited. Contact Tom Critchfield (tscritc@ilstu.edu) with your idea.

Premise: Contemporary behavior analysis is big and diverse and vibrant. So much has been achieved that it’s easy to take our successes for granted. But we got here through the efforts of people with crazy competence, persistence, and creativity, and valuable lessons can be learned by examining how they made possible our discipline’s hard-won advances. Posts in the Pioneers series are brief snapshots of their contributions, hopefully described in a way that gives readers food for thought about how to approach their own lives and careers.

Importantly, in a discipline that’s so big and diverse, no one is fluent with all of it. One particular goal of Pioneers posts is to highlight people who might be familiar in one specialty area and virtually unknown in others. In another series of posts, I’ve emphasized the benefits of knowing about a ton of different things. One of the best ways to understand an area outside of your own, and to find connections to your own interests, is to see how it was originally forged. The people described in these posts helped to make that happen.

by Nick Burkey (nick.burkey@gmail.com)

Robert F. (Bob) Mager, tireless promoter of basing instruction around good behavioral objectives, who was possibly the 20th Century’s most influential evangelist of instructional design.

Here is Bob Mager’s biography in Wikipedia.  It’s a nice, brief introduction to someone who accomplished a lot, but it’s not the kind of thing that Bob Mager, the Bob Mager, one of the most influential and successful trainers in history, would ever read or write. Bob’s approach to training (to everything) was to sweat the details, b

Robert F. Mager passed away May 11, 2020, just shy of his 97th birthday. His influence on instructional design theory and practice in the last 58 years, even for new designers who are not aware of his name or his work, has been enormous.

Mager was one of the founders of the International Society for Performance Improvement (or ISPI, originally known as NSPI) in 1962. His first book, published in 1962 under the title Preparing Objectives for Programmed Instruction (later re-published as Preparing Instructional Objectives) is probably the most widely-read book ever written on the topic of instructional design. In fact, Bob Mager is one of the 10 most-cited authors in the field. Collectively, over 3 million copies of his books have been sold.

If you are not familiar with Mager, you owe it to yourself to get, read, and build your own instructional design work on his most significant books, “The Mager Six-Pack”:

• Preparing Instructional Objectives
• Making Instruction Work
• Analyzing Performance Problems (with Peter Pipe)
• Goal Analysis
• Developing Attitude Toward Learning
• Measuring Instructional Results

Managers should add to that list What Every Manager Should Know About Training: An Insider's Guide to Getting Your Money's Worth From Training.

Not to sound melodramatic, but Bob Mager changed my life. Seriously. I met him when my wife and I attended his workshop “Preparing Instructional Objectives” in San Diego in 1974. It was eye-opening to me at the time to learn first that if a person could do a task because his or her life depended on it, this was not a problem that required training. (As Mager put it, "If you put a gun to their head, could they do it?") And second, to learn that an instructional designer should be concerned with the outcomes of instruction for the learner, not with the activity of the instructor. I have used what I learned from Bob Mager in every development project I have done in