Donald L. Kirkpatrick

Donald L. Kirkpatrick, who lived from March 15, 1924 to May 9, 2014, was Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and a past president of the American Society for Training and Development. He is best known for creating a highly influential four level model for training course evaluation, which served as the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation in 1954. His ideas reached a broader audience through a series of 1959 articles in the US Training and Development Journal and are better known from his 1994 book Evaluating Training Programs. The roots of his four levels lie in the ideas of Raymond Katzell, and his work is carried on by his eldest son, Jim Kirkpatrick.