Needs Assessment

Needs assessment is a term that covers several different types of analyses. It sometimes refers to a process of discovery, for example, going out and sampling some facet of public or professional opinion. This is essentially a perception check of sorts. Some questions might be:

• Survey teachers and determine what materials they think they need for teaching reading next year
• Ask parents what electives they would like to see in the school's curriculum
• Survey principals to determine how they rate the three different kinds of computers that might be purchased for the school district

The responses to these questions represent feelings and perceptions of a designated group of respondents. Needs assessment was an activity of discovering the state of such feelings and perceptions.

There is another use of the term needs assessment, which is quite different. In this approach, the process is more formal and is based on a discrepancy as opposed to a discovery model. The idea of a discrepancy requires beginning with some known facts, such as current achievement test scores, or frequency list of some kind, such as number of library books checked out over a given time period. This is the current situation, or the “what is” benchmark. A second benchmark is required to be developed. This second indicator is the “what should be.” The creation of the “what should be” often involves the process of visioning or imagining a changed situation. Once the “what should be” is established, then the analyst proceeds to calculate the difference or the gap between the two. The discrepancy or gap is the need. A need is met when the gap is closed or erased.

Roger Kaufman's 1992 work, Mapping Educational Success, is seminal in the field. He posits that a gapbased needs assessment approach works on several different levels. The widest arc or level of thinking is called the megalevel, and it involves thinking about social goals, social problems, and issues and determining how these matters could be resolved globally. The gaps are between indicators of social problems (crime rate, poverty, etc.) and their amelioration. It is necessary to think about this wider arc because schools are part of the social fabric. They are either solutions to such problems or they perpetuate them by not addressing them. The macrolevel of needs assessment represents the place where a school system's graduates enter the larger society. A comparison of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes required of the graduates in order to live well and resolve societal issues is the locus of a macrolevel needs assessment. A third level is the microlevel. This is the juncture where internal to the school system, an analysis might occur. A comparison of test scores as students move from elementary to middle school might yield a microlevel gap analysis.

These three levels of needs assessment activities occur within a rational planning framework; that is, planning is based on assumptions regarding the stability, efficacy, and logic of the organization itself. As social service organizations, schools and school systems are expected to be rational, that is, be able to connect their resources to student learning. Even if the process is not well understood as to how such [Page 695]connections actually work within schools, the expectation is still dominant in nearly all approaches to thinking about how schools work or should work.

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