The students will be given a narrative of a case study that carefully mirrors a current event and involves a dilemma. The dilemma will take the form of a quagmire where there are no right or wrong answers. The key lies in the justification of the answer made, efficiency and practicality of the solution offered. Upon studying the narrative, the students will be instructed to reflect on the issue and come up with innovative solutions. The assignment will be an asynchronous activity since even the duration each student will take to complete it will inform part of the needs assessment. When all students are through, they will make a brief presentation to the entire class where they will be called upon to defend their ideas. This will only be done when all the ideas have been handed over to prevent amendments based on other student’s presentations. How the students put one another to task about their presentations is also part of the needs assessment (Redmond, 2017) .
What I Already Know
One of the fundamental basis for education is to prepare students for future in the job market. The modern job market continues to mutate as most of the mundane and repetitive activities become automated through computerization. This will make thinking and the ability to reflect among the most important prerequisites of the future employee. It shall, therefore, be incumbent upon every educator to ensure that the ability to rationalize, apply logic, use past experiences, and reason in order to solve a problem is well-developed in every student. The instant needs assessment is geared towards testing the student’s ability as outlined. This will enable their instructor to develop a scheme of training them to achieve optimum abilities in this area.
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What I Want to Know
The general idea behind the needs assessment is to establish the abilities to reason and rationalize issues. The students have lived their lives up to this point and have thus developed various knowledge about issues and circumstances. This is critical to their abilities to apply logic and reason over complex issues. The needs assessment is not about what they know but rather about their abilities to apply that knowledge in a practical situation. The asynchronous nature of the activity also qualifies it as a speed test. Under pressure, taking too long to arrive at a decision is almost the same as not arriving at a decision at all. Finally, the ability to believe in the decision and defend it or, the ability to admit that the decision was wrong also comes to the test.
What will be Measured, Determined, and/or Defined?
Perceived Needs
This relates to what people think about themselves and their needs. The “do-type” activity will not be gauged on how the students are able to solve the problem, although this is what the students will be made to believe. Instead, it will inter alia be judged based on the needs within themselves that they will come to realize in the course of solving the problem. The students may be focused on the problems and solutions but the assessors will be focused on student needs (Tomlinson, 2014) .
Expressed Needs
All the students will have perceived needs but a few will express them both in their written assignments and in their presentations. Expressed needs reflect the ability of the student to face, not evade the need, come to terms with it then express its existence. Expressed needs will reveal not just how the students are from a perspective of reflection but also what they think about themselves (Tomlinson, 2014) .
Relative Needs
As indicated above, this needs assessment is geared towards developing students into better future employees. When that future comes, there will no longer be a class but rather individual students facing individual challenges. The needs assessment will also evaluate the relative needs of each student to create an ability to develop a middle ground for training the class (Tomlinson, 2014) . Supplementary training can also be organized for those considered to be too needy to learn alongside the larger class.
Collecting and Recording Information
This needs assessment is in four phases. Phase one relates to how the students handle the reflection scenario question. The information regarding this phase will be collected and recorded through the written responses which will also be graded. The second phase relates to how fast the case will be handled. This will be recorded based on the time when the students will submit their responses through the online portal. The third phase will be through the presentation where the instructor will rate and grade the presentation based on a standard one to ten grading. Finally, there is how the students will interact and challenge one another through the presentation. A one to ten grading will also be used to collect and record the same (Redmond, 2017) .
Report the Information Collected
The final information collected will be synthesized into needs and will thus not be in the form of scores. The class will be divided into three segments with the reports being based on the same. The first will be based on the neediest group in the class and will encompass the needs nature and intensity. The same will be done for the average students and the least needy students. The information collected will be limited to the needs, not the solutions thereto (Redmond, 2017) .
Groups with Vested Interests
The instant needs assessment is limited in interest to the instructors and the students. The students will only participate while the instructors will handle the planning and implementations. All groups with vested interests will, therefore, have been involved.
References
Redmond, N. S. (2017). An exploration of teacher and student perceptions of classroom assessment ( Masters thesis ) . Brock University
Tomlinson, C. A. (2014). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners . The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
