In adult education, there are seven essential activities if evaluation is to have maximum use: understanding, specifying, describing, comparing, judging, valuing, and influencing. It is also necessary to understand the objectives being evaluated--their level (agency, program, project or course, and/or instructional) and kind (output objectives or objectives which help secure output); their characteristics (results of decisions, discriminatory, predictive, pluralistic, realistic, etc.). Objectives must also be understood as a system or parts of a system (content, behavior, and experience) and as having a role and function in programing (relationship to program purpose, source of the objectives and degree of commitment, meaning of objectives to those involved, guide or contract, etc.). The main problem in evaluation is getting good objectives written and used effectively in programing because of failure to deal with objectives as decision-making or failure to adjust concepts to overcome erroneous assumptions. The prospects for evaluating the attainment of objectives as a tool in programing depend upon adult educators building a concept of objectives and their use which is adjustable in adult education situations. (A fourteen-page bibliography accompanies the monograph.) (AG)