Why do we perform them and how are they relevant to designing assessment?
Learning situations can often seem deceptively simple: I want group A to do B. “Identifying Instructional Goal,” as Dick and Carey have it (1977, p. 58). That’s perhaps the most basic behaviorist approach to learning, and one that can develop a little through the complexity of ABCD learning objective design: Audience, Behavior, Conditions, and Degree of Mastery.
Needs Assessment returns our focus to the constituent components of learning and helps make visible the places where Instructional Design (ID) can increase opportunities for learning. But it also places the seemingly isolated idea of “Learning Goal” into an educational and instructional ecosystem, one that can also help us identify where there might be resources lacking rather than greater instruction needed, especially in the learning audience: “At the same time [as a learning objective is identified], an analysis is made of the target population to identify their entry behaviors and any characteristics which may have implications for the instructional process” (Dick and Carey, 1977, p. 58).
Getting the resource problem versus instructional problem right and calibrating it to the learner’s situation is key for effective instruction.
Dick and Carey (1977) made this point early in the history of Instructional Design:
Needs that may first appear to have instructional solutions may better be solved through (a) testing for selection and placement; (b) providing adequate materials, facilities, time and personnel to achieve a given task; (c) providing adequate incentives and rewards for performing a task; (d) providing appropriate supervision; and/or (e) developing an administrative policy to maintain performance at the desired level. (p. 56).
My own sense is that a lot of instructional problems can actually be solved by (c) and a lot of them would be solved by (b), but our socio-economic conditions often considerably limit (b) or limit (b) for our learners.
So even if we can’t solve (b) ourselves, it’s crucial to identify if (b) is causing the problem, as that will shape our ID or it might have us shift our energies elsewhere. You likely can’t ID your way fully out of a resource problem, but you can ID in response to it. For Slade (2025), on the issue of Can instruction solve the resource question, “Well, the quick answer is no, but I think there are some instances where training can help.” For instance, if the limited learner resource is time, what kinds of instructional technologies can help with reading completion? Many of my students have anecdotally claimed that audiobooks help a great deal.
So a key part of a Needs Assessment is, Given a realistic appraisal of resource conditions A, B, and C, what can the learners in question be reasonably expected to learn? This becomes more complicated with varying resource conditions in the target audience, which would then further require calibrating instructional to the widest possible resource range.
References
Dick, W., & Carey, L. M. (1977). Needs assessment and instructional design. Educational Technology, 17(11), 53–59.
Slade, T. (2025). How to conduct a needs analysis. The eLearning Designer’s Academy. https://community.elearningacademy.io/c/knowledge-base/how-to-conduct-a-needs-analysis-instructional-design