3 Determining Information and Instructional Needs of Users
Determining User Needs
The information literacy needs of our users are as diverse as the libraries that serve them. Librarians may have a feeling for what they would like users to know, but that may be very different from what the users would like to learn. Before planning information literacy sessions and exercises, the first step is to stop and systematically assess who your audience is and what the needs of your audience are. We will explore methods to identify the needs of your audience because above all else a teaching librarian must remain flexible.
Identify your Learner
Who is your audience? What do members of your audience have in common? It may be easier for you to imagine that you are selling a product or service. Who is most interested in this product or service? How can you best identify and target this audience? For example, if you worked for a small public library in Prescott, Arizona you might identify, ‘Snow Birds’ as your targeted audience for information literacy. Snow Birds are retirees that move seasonally to the Southwest during winter months. There are several things that Snow Birds tend to have in common. First, they tend to be elderly retirees. Snow Birds have a migratory lifestyle and tend to be highly active. Now that we have identified this group, we can conduct a needs assessment!
Conducting Needs Assessments
A needs assessment is a systematic approach to studying the state of knowledge, ability, interest, or attitude of a defined audience or group involving a particular subject. You have identified your audience, Snow Birds, and your instruction focus is information literacy.
The first goal of conducting a needs assessment is to learn what the audience already knows and thinks, so that we can next determine what aspects of information literacy are appropriate to focus on in session(s). The temptation is to jump ahead and immediately start formulating a session or exercises, but that would be problematic. First, we don’t know whether the session ought to be face to face, online, or both. Indeed we may immediately think of library services to market to Snow Birds, but we must stay focused on the information literacy needs. In fact, right now, we still don’t know what those needs are.
Comprehensive Needs Assessment
Comprehensive needs assessment research can help document actual problems and deficiencies in information literacy among your targeted audience. With the needs assessment in hand, you will be empowered with the knowledge to:
- Verify and describe the current situation for your target audience.
- Explain how the information literacy program will address the information literacy needs of your audience.
- Describe the expected impacts of your information literacy session(s).
Conducting a needs assessment is a way to demonstrate with evidence what your audience needs to know. There are two basic types of these assessments:
Direct Needs Assessment
A direct needs assessment is accomplished through formal research that gathers data from users (specifically your target audience). The direct assessment will result in hard data that is specific to the needs of your audience.
There are three data-collecting methods for a direct needs assessment:
- Surveys: written surveys may be conducted by mail, by e-mail, or by using a Web page. They also may be used to gather data from a group of individuals attending an event. Perhaps the annual ‘Welcome Back Snowbirds’ picnic?
- Interviews: Interviews can be conducted face to face or via technology. Interviews could be conducted with a single interviewee or multiple interviewees at the same time (group interviews).
- Focus groups: Focus groups are group discussions conducted in person with limited number of your target audience to gain information about their views and experiences on a topic
Note that the direct approach requires much more work and also requires institutional approval to conduct. If you are working at a large library you should consider conducting a direct assessment periodically for major program efforts.
Indirect Needs Assessment
An indirect needs assessment uses secondary data or asks surrogates (other librarians) for their opinions about priority needs and issues. An indirect approach can be conducted at any time. This could be as simple as asking other librarians familiar with Snow Birds, or as formal as creating an advisory committee of librarians to meet on a regular bases with specific stated goals. The indirect approach should include a literature review on the information literacy of Snow Birds. What have other librarians done on this topic? What can be learned from their triumphs and their mistakes?
Components of a Needs Assessment
There are seven components to conducting a needs assessment. The assessment plan begins as a description of the what, when, who, how, and designing, conducting, and evaluating a needs assessment. In truth, a needs assessment plan can be tailored to your discipline, the needs being assessed, the audience, and the environment. A quick search through your university’s databases, Google Scholar, and Google will give you many different examples of customized needs assessment plans.
Seven Components of a Needs Assessment Plan
- Write objectives: What is it that you want to learn from the needs assessment?
- Select audience: Who is the target audience? Whose needs are you measuring, and to whom will you give the required information?
- Collect data: How will you collect data that will tell you what you need to know? Will you collect data directly from the target audience or indirectly?
- Select audience sample: How will you select a sample of respondents who represent the target audience?
- Pick an instrument: What instruments and techniques will you use to collect the data?
- Analyze data: How will you analyze the data you collect?
- Follow up: What will you do with the information that you gain? Data gathering methods by themselves are not a needs assessment. For the process to be complete, the needs assessment has to result in decision making.
Needs Assessment Process
Sample Procedure
A quick note on sample procedure: It is important to determine whether you will collect data from the entire population or from a sample to represent the population. If your target audience is small- such as the Snow Bird community in Prescott, Arizona (population of 80 or so) then it makes sense to survey the entire population. For larger populations, sampling is a practical and cost-effective alternative. The number of respondents needed to provide data will depend on the size of the entire population and on the level of confidence you want to have in your results.
After reviewing the steps for a needs assessment, it appears to be lot of work to find out the needs of your target audience. However, if you are creating an information literacy program from scratch, this is highly worth the effort. The more you know about your audience, their needs and their perspectives on information literacy then the better prepared you are to teach. That being said, not everyone has the luxury to create a well-planned and organized needs assessment for their audience. Other options for centering your instruction based on need follow.
Training Needs Analysis (TNA)
Very similar to a needs assessment, a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is a formal process of identifying a training gap and its related training needs. It can be utilized before designing your information skills teaching or as part of a session. In the former case, it should be done in partnership with other key players—your target audience and those who might arrange or request the instruction (teachers, professors, community center leaders). Where a needs assessment’s focus is on pinpointing the information literacy needs of a target audience, the TNA looks for specific pre-identified objectives and targets gaps that need to be filled.
The TNA is practical in that the starting point is identifying and analysis of current and future requirements in terms of knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies. In a workplace setting, this will often appear in person specifications or competency frameworks; when working in an educational environment there may be course learning outcomes, level descriptors, competency framework or subject benchmark statements, like the ones that we discussed in chapter one.
Differentiation
To further help you differentiate between a needs analysis and a TNA let’s look at two quick examples.
Snow Birds in Prescott, Arizona do not belong to a formal educational system nor are they members of a particular organization that needs to meet previously identified training markers. However, Snow Birds could benefit considerably from information literacy sessions. The results of a formal survey, interview, or focus group would highlight their specific needs.
Medical students have very specific information literacy standards that must be assessed in order to complete graduation. To ensure that the medical students meet those specific goals, a librarian could perform a TNA with either the professors or the medical students themselves in a pre-session audit. The needs assessment and TNA strongly influence the ‘what’ of your teaching, while the learner analysis will affect the ‘how’ of your teaching.
The ADDIE Model for Instructional Design
A common model for instructional design is the ADDIE Model. Beginning with Analysis, thus emphasizing its importance in underpinning teaching and training:
◦Analysis
◦Design
◦Development
◦Implementation
◦Evaluation
This is a useful model when you begin to plan teaching, as the Analysis stage is often forgotten—especially when there isn’t time for an in-depth needs analysis or TNA. The ADDIE Model is actually a military training model that is flexible, simple, and effective.
Quick Assessment
Quick Assessment
When one needs to quickly assess learners here are some direct questions you can ask in the classroom:
- What knowledge will they already have? Match this to the prerequisites of your session. You may need to suggest pre-course reading or video modules.
- What fears might they have? This enables you to plan how to address these fears—it may be that you need to provide reassurance that the session won’t be too boring or a waste of time.
- What do they want to know? What is important to them (never underestimate how powerful this question can be in driving your learners to stay tuned in and motivated to learn?)
- What are their learning styles? Keep learning styles in the back of your mind and focus on including as many different learning styles into your activities as possible?
- Do they have any special requirements?
- What level of autonomy do they have? Are the learners used to planning their own learning or do they expect to receive detailed instruction from a teacher.
- What are their experiences of education? Remember that some of your learners may have varied experiences both positive and negative. You may need to ease anxious nerves of learners or provide additional support as needed.
- Be aware of cultural references. You may need to keep multiple examples and ways to talk about plagiarism. An example could be teaching international students about intellectual property. Cultural differences on this subject will vary depending on the cultures from which the students’ national origin.
Prior Knowledge
Information literacy teaching is often a one-off event delivered to learners of whom we have no prior knowledge and who we may not see again. This means that we might need to make guesses at prior knowledge, experience and motivations of learners when preparing the session. However, there are steps to take to help.
- Ask other stakeholders- these could be teachers, lecturers, societies or individuals involved in arranging the learning and teaching event.
- Ask the learners through a pre-session questionnaire. Remember to carefully word your questions. Note that people tend to under or overestimate their skill set.
Above all stay flexible and friendly. Know that you will have classrooms where students have dramatically different skill sets, cultural backgrounds, and motivations for attending your session(s). The more you know about your learners the better prepared you will be to lay out specific learning outcomes and creating information literacy activities and assignments that are both interesting versatile.
Chapter 3 Assessments
Information Literacy and First Year College Students Discussion
Information Literacy and First-Year College Students Discussion (5 points)
Read the following article:
Wilkes, J., Godwin, J., & Gurney, L. J. (2015). Developing Information Literacy and Academic Writing Skills Through the Collaborative Design of an Assessment Task for First Year Engineering Students. Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 46(3), 164-175. doi:10.1080/00048623.2015.1062260 Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00048623.2015.1062260
This article is open access, so following the link above should open the article; You can also access this through WVInfoDepot.org, then click on the Library Science database.
Then search the title of the article.
Discussion:
How did this new approach teach first-year engineering students information literacy? Do you think this was a successful approach? Why or why not? Respond to at least two other students’ posts.
Reflection Questions
- Choose a user. Briefly and informally explain what their needs are.
- Review the ADDIE Model.
- Does it look like a helpful tool for our teaching?
- Review the Quick Assessment.
- Do you think these questions would be better asked aloud?
- Would a survey be preferable?
- Do you think an audience might feel uncomfortable sharing some of the answers to these questions?
Needs Assessment Assignment
Needs Assessment Assignment (10 points)
Scenario: Congratulations! You are the Information Literacy Coordinator at the Cabell County, West Virginia Public Library. You are stationed at the Main Branch downtown. Your director informs you that she would like you create sessions to help the large number of unemployed library patrons who use the library’s services.
Task: In no less than 500 words conduct the first 5 steps to a needs assessment, which are shown below and worth 2 points each:
- Write objectives: What is it that you want to learn from the needs assessment?
- Select audience: Who is the target audience? Whose needs are you measuring, and to whom will you give the required information?
- Collect data: How will you collect data that will tell you what you need to know? Will you collect data directly from the target audience or indirectly?
- Select audience sample: How will you select a sample of respondents who represent the target audience?
- Pick an instrument: What instruments and techniques will you use to collect the data?
definition
systematic approach to studying the state of knowledge, ability, interest, or attitude of a defined audience or group involving a particular subject
A needs assessment that is accomplished through formal research that gathers data from users, specifically your target audience.
A needs assessment that uses secondary data.
formal process of identifying a training gap and its related training need
