Understanding Needs Assessment in Curriculum Development
The assessment of needs is a critical and complex issue, which comprises the most significant component of the curriculum development process. Teachers should play a pivotal role in this process if effective learning is ever going to take place.
These assessments of needs should be done with reference to the four P’s: Problem, People, Place, and Performance.
Roger Kaufman is known as the “Father of Needs Assessment”.
Five Basic Assumptions of This Model
- Curriculum and instruction (instructional design) are not separate or independent academic fields functioning in isolation from one another. Instead, they lie on one continuum and occupy different places on it. In other words, the curriculum is regarded as a realm so inclusive that it incorporates instruction as an integral part. So, we can use the word “curriculum discourse” instead of instruction also.
- All three fundamental factors of education, that are content, society, and student, must be incorporated into a needs-based curriculum model to assure the desirability of the outcome. In other words, the long-held view of the contradictory nature of these sources of information can be fundamentally, and not superficially as in Tyler’s rationale, reconciled. Such integration or reconciliation paves the way for distancing the curriculum from its traditional conceptions.
- A centralized curriculum development system is considered to be a more realistic option, at least for developing countries. The proposed model operates within the boundaries of such a curriculum development system.
- The model, from another perspective, transforms the centralized interests of policymakers into a reasonable state by stimulating the distribution of decision-making power while keeping the central office as a key player. It might, therefore, alternatively be regarded as a scheme aimed at curbing radical centralization tendencies.
- Reasonable, purposeful, and localized efforts at decentralizing the curriculum development process effectively increase the chances for obtaining the intended consequences of the program by capitalizing on factors proven to be involved in the implementation process, such as the “sense of ownership”.
Major Concepts and Features of This Model
- Multiple Levels of Needs Assessment: Needs assessment is done or can be undertaken at different levels or stages, each being distinguishable by certain characteristics.
- Differential Emphasis on Information Sources: Different levels or stages of needs assessment require emphasis to be placed on different sources. “Macro Level” decision-making calls for an assessment where major attention should naturally be paid to subject matter and society as relevant information sources for purposes of identifying “educational needs”, while relatively less attention can be paid to students for purposes of extracting “psychological needs”. On the contrary, “Micro Level” needs assessment represents an activity that requires a stronger emphasis to be put on students as a data source aiming at the identification of “psychological needs”, while less strong emphasis on the other two sources, namely subject matter and society.
- Dynamic and Interactive Nature: Needs-based curriculum development is a highly dynamic process. The levels or stages are interactive and mutually inform and reinforce one another. In other words, needs assessment is not done once and for all; it is rather a continuous process, and curriculum deliberation should never be considered final.
- The Necessity of Appeal to Different Types of Data: The proposed curriculum development model incorporates and encourages the utilization of different types of data, namely quantitative and qualitative or interpretive data. Each type of data is best suited to the process of acquiring needs information or decision-making at a specific level.
Steps Involved in the Needs Assessment Model
Based on the assumptions of this model, the following conceptual model is proposed as a multilevel approach to the curriculum development process. There are four phases in this model. Evaluation is not treated independently as an isolated phase in this model; rather, it is considered an encompassing element.
The Four Phases of This Model Are
- Macro-level subject-free needs assessment
- Macro-level subject-free needs assessment
- Micro-level state-specific needs assessment
- Micro-level classroom-specific needs assessment