Assess educational needs of students
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 10 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Judging the Qualities of Objects, Services, or People (4.A.2.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 10 occupations that perform it.
- Compile and interpret students' test results, along with information from teachers and parents, to diagnose conditions and to help assess eligibility for special services.
- Observe students during classroom and play activities to evaluate students' performance, behavior, social development, and physical health.
- Assess clinical education needs and patient and client teaching needs using a variety of methods.
- Determine training needs of students or workers.
- Interpret the results of standardized tests to determine students' strengths and areas of need.
- Evaluate the motor needs of individual students to determine their need for adapted physical education services.
- Observe students to determine qualifications, limitations, abilities, interests, and other individual characteristics.
- Collaborate with students, parents, teachers, school administrators, or counselors to determine student needs, develop tutoring plans, or assess student progress.
- Conduct needs assessments and strategic learning assessments to develop the basis for curriculum development or to update curricula.
- Assess students' physical progress or needs.
- Register, orient, and assess new students according to standards and procedures.
- Interview subject-matter experts or conduct other research to develop instructional content.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for judgment, authorisation and strategy, and what it costs.
There is nothing here worth buying beyond a good assistant. Software assembles the case and recommends an answer, which any $20 assistant already does; the decision is yours, and no product on this page changes that.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
10 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Adapted Physical Education Specialists
- Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors
- Career/Technical Education Teachers, Postsecondary
- Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
- Instructional Coordinators
- Nursing Instructors and Teachers, Postsecondary
- School Psychologists
- Self-Enrichment Teachers
- Special Education Teachers, Elementary School
- Tutors
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Assess student capabilities, needs, or performance”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Evaluate student work | 55 |
| Administer tests to assess educational needs or progress | 53 |
| Prepare tests | 48 |
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.