NA TIG Week: Models, Frameworks and Approaches for Needs Assessments of Learning, Organizational, Performance, and Related Human Activities by Maurya West Meiers

I’m Maurya West Meiers. I work at the World Bank as a Senior Evaluation Officer and am coauthor of A Guide to Assessing Needs: Essential Tools for Collecting Information, Making Decisions, and Achieving Development Results (available for free here).

My needs assessment and evaluation work often centers around areas of learning, capacity building, organizational development, management, performance, change management, and related topics.  For that reason, I often rely on models and resources from many diverse fields to help me “frame” my work.  These models and frameworks can also be helpful in designing your data collection instruments, by giving you a starting point when preparing a set of categories or lists to which informants can respond in areas you want to probe.  The following are some of my favorite models or resources for assessing learning, building capacity, improving performance, and managing change:

Rad Resource:

If you are looking for more models, frameworks or approaches on these and related topics, check out the following.

Needsassessment.org pages on models and theories. Ryan Watkins, manager of this page and my coauthor on A Guide to Assessing Needs, has put together these handy resources on models and theories for needs assessment.

The International Society for Performance Improvement is a good source for learning more about models and approaches and connecting with others interested in these topics, commonly termed Human Performance Technology (HPT).

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Needs Assessment (NA) TIG Week with our colleagues in the Needs Assessment Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our NA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

 

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