A few days ago Clive Shepard wrote a post entitled What’s the Problem with Kirkpatrick?

Who is Kirkpatrick?

For those of you who aren’t all geeky about instructional design, Donald Kirkpatrick came up with the four levels of instruction back in the late 1950s.  The four levels (according to Kirkpatrick) are:

1. Level 1: Reactions – measures how participants in a training program react to it.
2. Level 2: Learning – assesses the extent to which students have advanced in skills, knowledge, or attitude after a training event
3. Level 3: Transfer – evaluates if the newly acquired skills, knowledge, or attitudes are being used in the everyday environment of the learner
4. Level 4: Results – measures the success of the program in business terms by evaluating increased production, improved quality, decreased costs, reduced frequency of accidents, increased sales, and even higher profits or return on investment.

Are Kirkpatrick’s levels still relevant?

Clive thinks that there is still a place for these levels of evaluation in training in today’s learner-centric environments because learners should be able to answer the following questions:

• Did I enjoy it?
• Did I learn what I wanted?
• Was I able to put it into practice?
• Has it made any difference to my performance?
• And, as a form of ROI measure, do these improvements in performance justify the effort I put in?

Jane Bozarth posted back in January about some of the shortcomings of the Kirkpatrick taxonomy. She discusses alternatives to Kirkpatrick:

• Daniel Stufflebeam’s CIPP model
• Brinkerhoff’s Success Case evaluation model

Who influenced Kirkpatrick?

Over the weekend I watched The Story of Stuff. I find it interesting that back in the 1950s, our economy was designed to benefit big business. The ideas of “planned obsolescence” and “perceived obsolesce” were crafted to drive America’s economy. According to The Story of Stuff:

Retailing analyst Victor Lebow articulated the solution that has become the norm for the whole system. He said: “Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Now, 60 years later, we are paying for succumbing to the idea that we should be a nation of consumers. The idea behind The Story of Stuff is that we can change the direction of the economy and the nation by redesigning the way we deal with stuff. This snippit really caught my attention:

All this work is critically important but things are really gonna start moving when we see the connections, when we see the big picture. When people along this system get united, we can reclaim and transform this linear system into something new, a system that doesn’t waste resources or people (emphasis mine).

This got me thinking. Back in the 50s, a system was designed that made business grow stronger than people and governments. We are now paying the dues for living that system. Kirkpatrick came up with his four levels of instruction back in the 50s. Was he influenced by the folks who came up with these men who engineered the ideas of “planned obsolescence”? Do his levels support business needs over the needs of learners?

What do you think? Is it possible these systems are related?