Teaching Excellence 1: Assessing Learner Needs
What is a Needs Assessment and why is it so important?
To put it simply, a Needs Assessment (also referred to as a Needs Analysis) is how we, the educators, discover what the learning requirements are for our students. The assessment can take various forms but the goal remains the same, to help build an effective course that fulfills the requirements of both the student and sponsor (if applicable). Without first assessing what our students need to know, whether for school, employment, or general use, there is no way for us to design a curriculum that matches their individual needs.
The Needs Assessment is a tool, use it for your benefit.
What types of Needs Assessment are there?
As mentioned earlier, a Needs Assessment can take many forms, these include options such as a questionnaire, a ranking list, a writing prompt, a table, or even an interview. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on only three options that will be the most useful options to you on an everyday basis, then we will help you construct your own Needs Assessment to match your teaching style.
Questionnaire
Unsurprisingly, this is almost certainly the most common way that educators assess the needs of their students. These questions could be multiple choice, open-ended, closed-ended, true or false, or process questions. Building an effective questionnaire can be challenging at first, but once you understand the best and most useful questions to ask, the general formula will stay the same for the rest of your English teaching career. Let’s take a look at some example questions that can be utilized for many years:
What are your goals for this English course?
What topics or skills would you like to focus on?
Do you have any specific learning difficulties or challenges?
How much time are you willing to dedicate to English study outside of class?
What is your preferred learning style? (Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, reading/writing)
In which areas of English do you feel you need the most improvement? (Grammar, vocabulary, speaking, listening, reading, writing)
These questions are extremely useful but by no means comprehensive. The key to remember is that an excellent Needs Assessment will have multiple types of assessment on it, you cannot only ask questionnaire type questions and expect to get a full picture of the student requirements. Combining a questionnaire with the next two types of assessment that we will discuss is how you will manage to build your Needs Assessment that benefits you for years to come.
Ranking List
Simple, effective, and can be used multiple times throughout the course, what’s not to like about a good ranking list? This is a wonderful tool to allow your students to rank their own abilities relative to their own beliefs about their skills. Keep in mind though that some students may be overconfident, while some may be under confident when it comes to giving themselves a ranking. With that in mind, the most common ranking question that you have probably seen already will look something like this:
It’s very possible that two students with similar abilities could answer in very different ways based on their confidence about their own abilities. Confidence goes a long way to learning, but being confident by itself does not mean a student is proficient already. The key for you as the educator is to look at the pattern in the numbers, more so than the actual numbers themselves. Let’s take a look at the example below to explain what we mean by that:
Here we have Students A, B, and C that have all provided you a ranking of their own abilities. It would be quite easy to look at these rankings and say that Student B is the most gifted student because they gave themselves the highest scores, Student A is second, and Student C will likely struggle in the course. The truth is though, Student B may think way too highly of their own abilities, and Student C may just be a very shy but highly studious student. The key to look for here, as we mentioned previously, is the pattern in these responses. Notice how all of the students gave their lowest rankings in Speaking and Listening? And their highest rankings in Writing and Grammar? As the educator, it’s your job to gather all of your responses and look for the patterns in the data that help shape the course material. Based on the above scenario, if this is a general English course, you will want to favor Speaking and Listening lessons to help your students build confidence in those areas. Which students gave themselves higher scores is irrelevant to you at this stage before you have any in person experience with them.
Here are a few more example rankings that can be applied to your Needs Assessment:
Ranking the English skill categories in order for priority to learn
Ranking various categories for daily exposure to English at school, work, home, etc.
Ranking confidence using English in various situations
Table
Creating a table for your students to interact with is another great tool to help you understand the needs of the learners. A table could be considered somewhat similar to the ranking lists that we looked at previously; however, while a ranking list allows you to see what the student feels is the most important, a table allows you to categorize and organize specific topics. In order to explain further, let’s first look at an example table that can be applied to your Needs Assessment:
The questions in the column on the left can be customized to fit the specific scenario that you are teaching in, there would not be much point asking many of these questions to students under 15, for example. This table, though, does allow you to categorize each of your students' learning wants into specific categories, which in turn will allow you to find yet more patterns in the data. If 7 out of 10 students say “Very Often” for checking-in to a hotel, then it’s probably a good idea to incorporate that into one or more of your lessons. The ranking list allows you to find patterns in the potential strengths and weaknesses of your students, whereas the table allows you to find patterns in the potential uses of English that your students will require.
How and when should a Needs Assessment be administered?
The first question you should ask yourself when preparing to administer your Needs Assessment is whether this will be conducted electronically or face-to-face. Electronic Needs Assessments are generally the most common and easier of the two to conduct. This is the method we would recommend during your first assessment that you conduct with your students, exceptions may apply if you are teaching 1-on-1 classes, or with a very small number of students. Most importantly, this method allows you to collect a lot of information in a relatively quick manner. If you have a well designed assessment that can be sent electronically to all students way ahead of your first lesson, that will give you plenty of time to review and analyze the results and then build your course syllabus to match the requirements of your students. Once this initial assessment has been completed; however, you are not finished with your Needs Assessments yet.
Another Needs Assessment should be conducted at least once during the course, maybe more than once depending on your judgment of the situation. We will talk about crafting your syllabus in a separate post but for now, know that after a few lessons, or a few weeks of your course, it is always recommended to reevaluate your course syllabus based on your experience of and feedback from your students. In order to accomplish this, another Needs Assessment can be a useful tool to assess whether the students' requirements are being met, if they are feeling more or less confident than at the start of the course, or whether their learning needs have changed at all. On the occasion of this assessment, it can be a great idea to conduct this secondary assessment in person with an interview type of approach, where you ask more pointed and specific questions that are related to your course thus far. There are several reasons why this is helpful to you:
It allows you to evaluate the progress your students are making by listening to them speak
It allows you to evaluate your students listening skills because you are asking them questions verbally
It helps to provide more candid feedback for how the students feel about the course so far
It allows you to ask more probing questions and understand the “why” of your students’ responses.
Finally, conducting this Needs Assessment gives you all the tools you need to rework any future items in your course if necessary, rework your syllabus if required, and check that your materials are still appropriate for your learners. We cannot stress enough the importance of this reevaluation of your course after a few lessons, it is vital to know if your students are completely lost or whether they are taking onboard your information. Adjusting your course is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s what good educators do to ensure their students walk away satisfied.
Building your Needs Assessment
We’re happy to share with you a copy of the Needs Assessment that we regularly use. Feel free to download your copy below.
Downloadable Links
Please note that this assessment may not be perfectly suited to every situation. For example, if you’re working with young learners or business professionals, the questions you need might differ. This assessment is designed with a general approach, allowing you the flexibility to adapt it to your specific needs.
Here are some recommendations we follow when creating our Needs Assessments:
Always consider your audience first
Think about why each piece of information is important to your course creation
Use an easy to read and easy to navigate format
Create a baseline Needs Assessment that is saved in your folders, use this as your starting template for every Needs Assessment that you build off this one.
Make sure your Needs Assessment is saved in more than one format
Assume your students may use a translator on your questions, don’t make them too complicated, use simple words that are easy to translate.
If you have any colleagues, friends, or family close to you. Get a second look at your Needs Assessment.
Remember, we are here to help you build your Needs Assessment and customize it to your specific needs. If you feel you still have questions or want us to take a look and provide any feedback, feel free to send us an email here: educateenglish.info@gmail.com.
We wish you the best of luck with your Needs Assessment and look forward to hearing from you soon!
