Report on the Staff Training Needs Assessment for Programs Offering Basic Education for Adults. A.L.R.I. Occasional Paper #1.

A staff development needs assessment survey was conducted by the Adult Literacy Resource Institute, in cooperation with other Boston-area programs providing basic education services for adults, to gather information on what users and potential users of the institute wanted in the areas of inservice teacher education, training, and staff development activities for the coming years. Questionnaires were sent individually to 89 staff people of programs within the Boston Adult Literacy Initiative, and to people at 67 other programs (with an unknown number of total staff) doing basic education for adults. These recipients, in turn, were asked to distribute copies of the questionnaire to the staff at their programs. A total of l89 questionnaires were returned, 30 percent from initiative program questionnaires were returned, 30 percent from initiative program staff and 70 percent from other program staff. The rank order of categories of topic areas for inservice training chosen by the respondents were: (1) general basic education for adults (47%); (2) program administration (44%); (3) counseling (36%); (4) teaching English as a Second Language (33%); (5) teaching reading (32%); (6) teaching writing (3l%); (7) teaching in a credential program (20%); (8) teaching math (l6%); and (9) others (6%). (NLL)