Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation

Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation is a framework for judging how effective a training program is, developed by Donald Kirkpatrick out of his 1954 doctoral dissertation and first published to a wider audience in 1959. It evaluates training at four levels: Reaction, the degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging and relevant to their jobs; Learning, the degree to which they acquire the intended knowledge, skill, attitude, confidence and commitment; Behavior, the degree to which they apply what they learned once back on the job; and Results, the degree to which the training's targeted outcomes actually occur. Kirkpatrick popularized the model further in his 1994 book Evaluating Training Programs.