Teacher Involvement in School-Conducted Needs Assessments

Little attention in the literature on stakeholder shared decision making in program evaluations has been given to involving stakeholders in developing the process of decision making. If stakeholders are not fully involved in developing this process, decisions may be biased and lead to invalid evaluation findings. In this article, the authors present a theoretical model suggesting how stakeholder involvement in establishing the process of decision making in school-conducted needs assessments affects the validity of the selected needs, with validity defined as teacher agreement with the selection of needs. Using LISREL VII, the model was tested using teacher survey data. The findings show that teachers were not heavily involved in developing decision- making processes. However, they agreed with the selected needs, and their involvement in de veloping the decision-making processes accounted for a substantial portion of their agreement.