Donald Kirkpatrick (1924 – 2014)

'Donald Kirkpatrick (1924 – 2014)' by Richard Griffin, Training Journal, July 2014

It was through this article that I learnt that Donald Kirkpatrick died in May and I decided to review this summary of his life and work.  Unlike some other areas of management, there are not too many generally accepted frameworks that can be used to discuss learning issues and this made Kirkpatrick almost a ‘household name’ to Learning & Development professionals.

I remember early on in my career that it was a safe haven whenever the tricky issue of course valuation was raised.  ‘Which level are you looking for?’ was - and still is - an effective and valid response to questions about evaluation methods.

The article tells us that Kirkpatrick developed his four level framework over fifty years ago, which says something about its relevance and longevity.  The author points out that most other attempts to develop new concepts and frameworks have proved to be adaptations of Kirkpatrick;  he mentions as an example the framework developed by Jack Philips some years ago which merely added a fifth level that requires a calculation of Return on Investment.  At MTP we looked at this at the time and decided that it was no real improvement on Kirkpatrick and could raise false expectations about the ability to carry out quantified evaluations.

The article reminds us that it was fashionable in the 1980s and 1990s to criticise Kirkpatrick as being too simplistic, allowing Learning & Development professionals to be satisfied with level one ‘happy sheets’.  The criticism was based on the assumption that he suggested a progressive correlation between the levels; that the immediate satisfaction of level 1 would lead to the learning achieved at level 2 and then to improved performance at level 3.  If anyone thought that this was Kirkpatrick’s message, they would be right to criticise but we have never seen it that way or encouraged others to do so.

The message that Kirkpatrick tried to put over is quite different; he said that each level should be addressed independently.  At MTP we agree with this point but also believe that, while all four levels are possible, it becomes increasingly difficult and time/cost intensive as you move upwards.  But the pay-off can be worthwhile if you are able to prove the lack of correlation, for instance that the popular course with the charismatic presenter is great at level one but fails at the other three levels.  The choice of whether to go to higher levels is for each group of stakeholders to make, based on the importance and scale of the programme and the resources available to carry out the evaluations.

The article reveals some personal information about Kirkpatrick that was new to me.  Firstly that his son is carrying on the family consulting business and seems to have the same practical approach; he describes the four levels as – Reaction, Learning, Behaviour and Results.  The other information is that Kirkpatrick had senior level HR experience before entering academia at the University of Wisconsin and this period of practical experience led him to be more realistic and pragmatic than other contemporary academics.  He was apparently also a song writer and musical performer, which he much preferred in his later years.

Not many academics in the area of business management can be said to have created a new language and influenced the way we think quite like Donald Kirkpatrick.  His four levels may not be rocket science but it has made many of us think more clearly and realistically about evaluation, which remains the most challenging of issues for Learning & Development professionals.

Read the article here