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A Practical Guide to Needs Assessment, Third Edition For fifteen years, A Practical Guide to Needs Assessment has been the go-to text for those who are seeking useful, systematic approaches to needs assessment. Needs assessment is the first step in training, performance improvement, and community development projects. This thoroughly revised and updated edition contains a treasury of resources including a toolkit of ready-to-use templates and job aids that you can customize for your own use. Illustrative case studies and tips show how to assess needs for individuals, teams, organizations, government agencies, and communities. This book combines a how-to text and reference tool for trainers, performance improvement professionals, and students. Managers and community leaders use it to get to the root of their learning and performance problems, make effective decisions, and obtain support for their most pressing issues. Updates to the third edition include: * Links to online resources, including a needs assessment book that you can download for free, ethical guidelines, and vendors who assess individual, group and organizational needs. * A new chapter on the complex needs assessment approach with new toolkit forms. * A summary of the recent advances in our knowledge about learning, training, and performance that you can use to quickly prepare for client meetings. * Guidelines on workforce surveys, such as employee engagement surveys. * An Instructor's Guide that contains discussion questions, assessments materials, and new exercises for each chapter. You can use this book to quickly access up-to-date information on the fundamentals of needs assessment including current models, theories, and resources. You can also learn how to manage and report a needs assessment project and access professional ethical guidelines. Learn five approaches to needs assessment: knowledge and skills analysis, job and task analysis, competency-based needs assessment, strategic needs assessment, and complex needs assessment.

The final book in the Needs Assessment Kit, this volume focuses on the third phase by describing how to create and implement an action plan derived from needs priorities in ways that will enhance organizational learning and support future success.

Objective Manual therapy is a crucial component in rehabilitation education, yet there is a lack of models for evaluating learning in this area. This study aims to develop a foundational evaluation model for manual therapy learning among rehabilitation students, based on the Delphi method, and to analyze the theoretical basis and practical significance of this model. Methods An initial framework for evaluating the fundamentals of manual therapy learning was constructed through a literature review and theoretical analysis. Using the Delphi method, consultations were conducted with young experts in the field of rehabilitation from January 2024 to March 2024. Fifteen experts completed three rounds of consultation. Each round involved analysis using Dview software, refining and adjusting indicators based on expert opinions, and finally summarizing all retained indicators using Mindmaster. Results The effective response rates for the three rounds of questionnaires were 88%, 100%, and 100%, respectively. Expert familiarity scores were 0.91, 0.95, and 0.95; coefficient of judgment were 0.92, 0.93, and 0.93; authority coefficients were 0.92, 0.94, and 0.94, respectively. Based on three rounds of consultation, the model established includes 3 primary indicators, 10 secondary indicators, 17 tertiary indicators, and 9 quaternary indicators. A total of 24 statistical indicators were finalized, with 8 under the Cognitive Abilities category, 10 under the Practical Skills category, and 6 under the Emotional Competence category. Conclusion This study has developed an evaluation model for manual therapy learning among rehabilitation students, based on the Delphi method. The model includes multi-level evaluation indicators covering the key dimensions of Cognitive Abilities, Practical Skills, and Emotional Competence. These indicators provide a preliminary evaluation framework for manual therapy education and a theoretical basis for future research.

Background: Cancer influences various aspects of patients’ functioning. Cancer patients face not only medical problems but also organizational, socio-psychological, and spiritual problems. Their needs often seem to be unrecognized because patients do not express their concerns and clinicians do not ask appropriate questions. Unmet needs impact patients’ quality of life. The aim of this study was to select, adapt, validate, and introduce a simple instrument for estimating cancer patients’ unmet needs in Poland. Methods: The Needs Evaluation Questionnaire (NEQ) was chosen for validation in a Polish population. The Polish version of the NEQ was developed with a back-translation procedure, as approved by a psycho-oncologist and a public health specialist. The psychometric properties of the NEQ (content analysis, reliability, construct validity, comprehensibility, and acceptability) were measured. Results: This study was performed on a group of 121 cancer patients. The median time of completion for the NEQ was 10 min. The form, length, and font size of the NEQ were accepted by the respondents. Overall, the meaning of the questions was well understood, with only a few cases of discreetly heterogeneous interpretation of the content. The questionnaire showed good reliability and internal factor structure validity. Conclusion: The NEQ is a simple, easy-to-administer instrument with good psychometric properties and seems to be useful in assessing the unexpressed needs of cancer patients.

This article discusses how Information and Communication Technologies can support 21st century assessment strategies and what needs to be done to ensure that technological advances support and foster pedagogical innovation. Based on an extensive review of the literature, it provides an overview of current ICT‐enabled assessment practices, with a particular focus on the more recent developments of ICT‐enhanced assessment tools that recognise 21st century skills. The article also refers to relevant cases of eAssessment, looks into examples of the potential of emerging technologies for eAssessment and discusses some relevant innovation and policy issues. Reflecting on these examples, it argues that, although technological challenges exist, the more pressing task at present is to transcend the traditional testing paradigm and conceptually develop (e)Assessment strategies that allow to more fully exploit the benefits of emerging technologies in order to foster the development of 21st century skills.

As a tool serving other disciplines of enquiry, artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential of a potent discovery, a design and analysis paradigm to address (new) questions in urban planning. This thematic issue raises a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogues at the intersection of urban planning and AI. Nine articles discuss both emerging use cases in urban planning practice and the relevant AI techniques being used and developed, as well as articulate the challenges associated. Future development of AI in urban planning shall address the ethical, inclusive, and just implications of AI applications for urban planning while navigating human and AI agents’ interactions and intra-actions to facilitate a better understanding of the intentions of AI development and use, and the impacts on the behaviour of designers and users in complex urban planning practices.

Developed countries regard preschool education as an important starting point and foundation for elite training. In recent years, preschool education has also attracted a growing attention in developing countries like China. Considering the significance of the teaching quality of preschool teachers to lifelong academic achievement, this paper designs a teaching quality evaluation model for preschool teachers based on deep learning. Firstly, a progressive system with a hierarchical structure was developed for the relevant evaluation indices. Then, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation of each index layer and evaluation criterion was determined by the principle of fuzzy relationship synthesis. Finally, an evaluation prediction model was established based on extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithm and technology services’ ResNet (TS-ResNet), and proved effective and accurate through experiments. The research results provide a reference for the application of the proposed model in other evaluation prediction scenarios.

Since the mid 1970s, a series of international declarations that recognize the critical link between environmental sustainability and higher education have been endorsed and signed by universities around the world. While academic initiatives in sustainability are blossoming, higher education lacks a comprehensive evaluation framework that is specifically tailored to the challenges of assessing sustainability programs. The article elaborates a novel framework for assessing the diverse set of higher-education curricular, research, and community-outreach programs devoted to sustainability based on critical review of quantitative- and qualitative-evaluation methods and on lessons drawn from experience in international development. The proposed multidimensional evaluation framework links process, outputs, outcomes, impacts, and continuous programmatic improvement based on sustained, contextually relevant observations. It engages three core purposes: management evaluation, capacity- and capability-development evaluation, and sustainability evaluation. Embedded in these purposes are key evaluation criteria adapted from an assessment of UNDP contributions to national development: long-term outcomes and impacts; evidence of cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional synergy; and resource mobilization for program enhancement. Along with practical examples of evaluation approaches used by universities in Europe, Japan, and the United States and the lessons that academic sustainability evaluators can draw from these practices, competencies required of graduates from sustainability programs are identified. The specific evaluative questions and methods presented offer universities a useful, conceptually grounded framework for adaptation and application in academic-sustainability assessments. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

Background China is adopting and promoting the mini-midline catheter insertion technique, which requires professional training to ensure its application and patient safety. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of the Train-the-Trainer model in nurse training for Mini-Midline Catheter Insertion. Methods A medical center selected venous therapy specialist nurses for mini-midline catheter procedure training, after which these nurses became trainers and guided other nurses. The research utilized a mixed-methods design, incorporating puncture condition surveys and open-ended questions. Over the following six months, outcomes such as catheter insertion success rates were monitored, and nurses’ interviews were analyzed using the Kawakita Jiro method. Results A total of 675 mini-midline catheters were inserted in the study, with a success rate of 97.54%. The success rate for first-attempt punctures was 86.51%, with 584 successful cases and no catheterization-related complications. After training, expert consultations for catheter issues decreased from 28.46 to 9.25%. Additionally, three key themes of the training were identified: (1) enhancing nurses’ professional sense of achievement and job satisfaction through skill mastery; (2) familiar groups and environments are more conducive to improving training effectiveness; and (3) the multifaceted role opens up a brand new path for the professional development of nurses. Conclusion The mini-midline catheter insertion training program based on the “train-the-trainer” model effectively ensures the standardization of nurses’ techniques and the safety of punctures while also cultivating educators and thus deserves widespread promotion. Clinical trial number Not applicable.