THE EuTEACH CURRICULUM : NEEDS ASSESSEMENT

The users of the curriculum are strongly advised to carry out an assessment of the needs of those professionals who will be taking the course. This will help ensure that the audience’s expectations are met by the course when it is finally organised. It will also help the teacher to select appropriate training objectives and to design an appropriate course evaluation which fits these objectives.

• Download the needs assessment instructions & sheets

• Selecting the target audience
  
  Your target audience will need to be selected on a number of different factors - the setting in which you and work, the training priorities established in your region/country, and finally the specific requests you receive from professional groups. Obviously, the needs will be different depending on whose needs you are addressing ie. the needs of child psychiatrists, gynaecologists, general practitioners, or more broadly, of medical students, nurses, psychologists, social workers or teachers. Some teachers prefer to select participants with similar practices in order to provide a highly focused training, whilst others may prefer to broaden the scope of their intervention and mix professionals with various backgrounds, so as to bring together as many different points of view as possible. Both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages .
  
  An evaluation of the needs of the target audience is a prerequisite for fulfilling your own teaching objectives as well as ensuring your audience’s satisfaction. Ideally, this assessment should be performed prior to the organisation of the course, so that you will be able to select the appropriate modules, place them in a suitable order within the course and choose the appropriate training strategies and tools. It is however not always possible to conduct such a survey (see annex) before the course is set up. A more expeditious way to solve this problem is to circulate a short form outlining the main issues to be included in the course and their relative importance to the participants, once they have registered. Finally, an alternative is to begin the session with a quick discussion during which every participant introduces himself and explains his expectations.
  
  
  
• General concept of the ‘needs’ assessment
  
  You should first have an idea of the professional background of the audience:
  1. socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, married, children, etc.)
  2. type of training, year of graduation, specialisation, etc.
  3. current activities (setting, clinical/research/prevention, etc)
  4. involvement with adolescents (percent of their total time spent with adolescents)
  5. orientation, network, multidisciplinary approach, etc.
  6. type of supervision
     
• Second, you should set about targeting the needs they identify in their current practice
  • areas in which they feel have difficulties and thus want to improve their performance
  • whether they feel they wish to emphasise learning about ‘knowledge’, ‘attitudes’ or ‘skills’
    
• Finally it is a good idea if you can also assess their availability to attend the course and their preferred mode of intervention i.e.:
  • over several short sessions
  • over less numerous but longer sessions 
    
• Organisation
  
  First identify your target population and how you are going to attempt to reach it.
  Fix your objectives and your time schedule.
  Select an appropriate mode of communication with your target audience (email, letter etc).
  Design your questionnaire.
  Collect the data.
  Analyse the data, disseminate the content.

You will then be able to:

1. Plan your session
2. Plan your evaluation

We provide an example of the type of questionnaire you can use for such an assessment

Download the questionnaire