Week 5 Lecture on Needs Assessment

This week, we learnt about Needs Assessment. How does Needs Assessment fit into the overall picture? The chapter summary at the end of the reading provided me with a macro-perspective on things.

First, we need to understand that Instructional Analysis or "front-end analysis" involves analyzing 3 components, namely:

i) instructional context (learning environment); ii) prospective learner; and

iii) learning task

This week's lecture zooms in on the first component: Instructional Context. There are two steps to analyzing Instructional Context. Step 1 is to conduct Needs Assessment and Step 2 is to draw up a description of the Learning Environment.

The purpose of a Needs Assessment is to determine whether there is actually a need for new instruction to be developed. There are 2 scenarios when designing new instruction would be considered a waste of time and resources:

1. Developing new instructional materials for topics that students are already learning well with existing cost-effective instruction.
2. When there is no compelling reason for a student to learn a particular skill or knowledge. This occurs when there is no subsequent learning goal or future job task that require the acquisition of that skill or knowledge

Needs Assessment and evaluation plans should be constructed simultaneously. There are 3 conditions which calls for Needs assessment and there are 3 models which work best under each condition:

1. Condition A: There is a problem. Use the Problem Model.
2. Condition B: There is something new that learners need to learn e.g. when there are changes or innovations in the educational system or organization and new learning goals should be added to the curriculum to accomodate those changes or innovations. Use the Innovations Model.
3. Condition C: No apparent problem but organization would like to evaluate learning/training programme to check that goals and reality are congruent. Use Discrepancy Model.

The steps for each Model are provided in the reading so I shall not list them down here. One point that I would like to highlight is that the Innovations Model may lead existing goals to be reexamined through the Discrepancy Model. The reason why I would like to highlight this is because when attempting the self-assessment, I did not tick the above statement because I viewed the 3 Models in isolation of each other and totally forgot about the arrow that linked the Innovations Model in the ANALYSIS portion of the circle to the Discrepancy Model in the EVALUATION portion of the circle (refer to diagram above).

While on the topic of evaluation, I would like to express that I feel the value of the Discrepancy Model is in its evaluative quality. In step 2 of the Discrepancy Model, "Determine how well the identified goals are already being achieved', there is one important question that is raised about whether existing instruction is being delivered efficiently.

A particular statement made in that paragraph stimulated my thinking: "There are occasions... when learning goals are being reached... but only with a Herculean effort on the part of teachers/trainers and/or learners."

At this point, I realized that effective instruction should not only emphasize on minimizing the effort put in by teachers to teach, but it should also minimize the effort that learners need to put in to learn.

I recall the times in my J.C and secondary school when I got really lousy teachers in a sense that they fared poorly on instruction and the poor students had to put in extra effort to re-read the lecture notes and textbooks in order to understand what the teacher was trying to say.

I suppose this is one of the reasons why Needs Assessment is important. It helps evaluate whether instructional delivery is efficient so that BOTH teachers and students do not need to exert excessive effort to achieve the learning goals - just what is sufficient to attain them.

Extrapolating it into the NUS context: perhaps if ALL the courses taught had efficient delivery in a sense that lecturers mastered the technique to effectively deliver content only once and the student would be able to grasp the concept, then we would have more time to pursue our other interests in life than to spend our academic career mugging only. Haha......

This was just a thought that struck me spontaneously but it got me to appreciate the value of the evaluative aspect of Needs Assessment. Perhaps if I do become a trainer or teacher one day, I will remember what I said and try to develop a way to deliver content only once and my participants/students would immediately be able to grasp the concept. *imagine.....*