Donald Kirkpatrick: The Four Levels Analysis

previously served as president and with whom he maintained strong connections. Donald Kirkpatrick has written several other significant books about training and evaluation. Donald Kirkpatrick's 1975 book Evaluating Training Programs defined his originally published ideas of 1959, thereby further increasing awareness of them, so that his theory has now become the most widely used and popular model for the evaluation of training and learning. Kirkpatrick's four-level model is now considered an industry standard across the HR and training communities. The four levels of training evaluation model was later redefined and updated in Kirkpatrick's 1998 book, called 'Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels'.
The four levels of Kirkpatrick's

In his 1994 book ―Evaluating Training Programs: the Four Levels, Kirkpatrick suggests that the effort and overheads required to evaluate at successively higher levels requires a growing amount of effort and resource, so it is perhaps easier and cheaper to evaluate at Level 1 but this is unlikely to be the case at Level 4. This is the argument (made by Kirkpatrick himself) for evaluating some 95% of training at Level 1 but perhaps only 5-10% of training at Level

Although level one is the least complex of the measures of evaluation developed by Kirkpatrick, no studies were found that reported use of level one as a sole measure of training.
One application of the second level of evaluation, knowledge, was reported by Alliger and Horowitz20 In this study the IBM Corporation incorporated knowledge tests into internally developed training. To ensure the best design, IBM conducted a study to identify the optimal test for internally developed courses.
Four separate tests composed of 25 questions each were developed based on ten key learning components.
Four scoring methods were evaluated including one that used a unique measure of confidence. The confidence measurement assessed how confident the trainee was with answers given. Tests were administered both before and after training. Indices from the study assisted the organization to evaluate the course design, effectiveness of the training, and effectiveness of the course instructors. The development of the confidence index was the most valuable aspect of the