Setting Objectives

I was involved with education for 42 years as a teacher, principal and district administrator, consequently I am familiar with the principles of evaluation and working to objectives. I think that your task as a loft manager will be much easier if you set good objectives. The process is quite easy. Set an objective that you can evaluate, work towards achieving it, then test to see if you have achieved it. I wonder how many fanciers do that?

Let us examine some objectives. "All birds must fly 200 miles as young birds, single up in good time according to the weather conditions, e.g. a velocity of 1200 yards per minute."

This is easy to evaluate. Any birds that don't do that have failed. It is a limited objective, but one that is easy to evaluate. It doesn't take into account what you wish the birds to do after their first year but that can be covered by other objectives. Also, it doesn't allow for birds which could do better as old birds. Don't make objectives too general such as "produce good birds." This objective is too vague and could take years to achieve. Also, what do you mean by "good birds"?

In order to evaluate your objectives satisfactorily, you must keep certain factors constant. If you are evaluating a bird's performance under a definite management system, you can't evaluate one bird on the natural system against one flying widowhood. If you wish to evaluate one group of birds against another group flown on a different system, the two groups should be of equal quality and flown under identical conditions of distance and weather. In this case only the system of management is different and that is what you could evaluate. If the weather had been different then the results could have been different. I have given the above example to show that you must exercise extreme care in setting objectives and in evaluating them. Flawed objectives and evaluation do not help you in improving your results in breeding and racing. I think setting objectives and evaluating the results is more interesting than stumbling along in the dark not knowing whether you are making real progress or not.

There are different systems of evaluation. You can evaluate how a bird performs against some objective you set for it alone. For example, bird "A" must fly 200 miles single up as a young bird in five hours or less in good weather. It doesn't matter how any other bird performs, you are only interested in bird "A" reaching the objective you have set for it. This is known as criterion-referenced evaluation because you set the criteria and then test the bird. In between setting the criteria and testing the bird, you might have prepared it for the task by giving regular exercise, etc.

Another system of evaluation is standardized testing. Here you test the bird's performance against the average performance of a large number of birds. If the average performance for a 2-year-old in your club is to fly 500 miles on the day in good weather, and bird "B" cannot do this, then it is below average.

You can also set objectives for your breeding stock. For example, you might decide that any pair in your stock loft must breed a certain number of winners and if they don't do that, they are out. By setting objectives and testing for results you will make progress.

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