What is audience analysis?

As the name suggests, it’s analyzing the characteristics of the population to whom you’ll be delivering training.  

Why should I do it?

At first glance, the academic audience seems obvious:  why, our audience is college students, of course!  That is, traditional 18-20 year-old, wet-behind-the-ears college freshman straight out of high school.

But are they, really?  These days, our student population is increasingly diverse.  Many are older, with some returning to school after raising children, others using education for work advancement, and still others who took a few years off to work and raise money for college.  They're also more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse.

To find out exactly who you’re teaching, we need to do an audience analysis.  The results will help you to better tailor your instruction to fit the needs of your students.

What are the areas used in audience analysis?

This list isn't exhaustive, but it'll give you the idea.

Ask yourself: what are my students':

• SKAs: This is instructional designer jargon for “skills, knowledge, and attitudes”.

• Experiences:  What common experiences can be used to build community and construct analogies?

• Misconceptions: What erroneous thinking do they enter your class thinking they know about your discipline?

• Preferences:  What are their favorite TV shows?  Movies? Bands? Books? Magazines? 

• Demographics:  What’re their ages, ethnicities, neighborhoods, and socioeconomic statuses?

• Goals: What do they want or expect to get out of the class?

• Uses: How will they use the information and skills they learn in your class out in the world?

• Preferred learning styles:  do they prefer receiving information by seeing it, hearing it, or doing it?

• Motivations: what motivates them?  Money?  Jobs? Personal growth?

• Language abilities: are they native speakers or is English their second language?

• Technical vocabularies: if you use the usual jargon of your field, will they understand or will it sail right over their heads?

What’s an example of an audience analysis?

Suppose you’re teaching a night class primarily composed of adult learners (older than traditional college age).   Research suggests that adult learners:

• Prefer greater participation: so you might want to design more active learning exercises into your class than you would for a class that preferred less participation.

• Have a greater need to share their experiences: being older, they tend to have more real-world experience with jobs and relationships and appreciate being able to share it.  So you might want to ask students to bolster any theory you’ve just related with real-world examples instead of automatically providing the examples yourself.

• Have a greater need to appear competent: if you’re young and you fail, you can always chalk it up to youthful naiveté (after all, there’ll be plenty more chances, right?)  But when you’re older, you’re supposed to have learned it already (and there’s presumably less time left to learn it if you haven’t!).  You might want to brush up on your questioning skills so as to have multiple ways to avoid embarrassing people who give wrong answers.

• Are more worried about their study skills: even though their work ethic often leads them to be the more successful students, time away from school makes them fear they’ve completely lost their academic skills. You may want to take small snippets of class time to give study tips (or at least “off-load” study tutorials onto print handouts or your web site).