Continuing education can be looked at as a living system and, as such, assessment is viewed as an integral part of the control function. The use of control functions models of assessment provides a living systems point of view and allows for such new and different questions to be posed as: (1) What are the significant levels of perception and control in our systems? (2) What are the significant controlled quantities? (3) What biases are input functions, directing our attention or enabling us to sense (or ignore) conditions? (4) How do we bias the input functions to detect the controlled quantities more effectively? (5) What are the sources of our reference signals and what effect do they have on our systems? (6) How does continuing education become more responsive to real problems? (7) How are lower levels of control tapped to provide higher levels of control with more direct perceptions of controlled quantities? (8) What is the range of control of our educational interventions? and (9) How much error will our systems tolerate? Such an approach will, hopefully, enable the development of new approaches to studying and applying needs assessment methodology. (CHC)