Don Kirkpatrick that is.
I was chuffed to find a Kirkpatrick on the bill here at the Asian HRD Conference talking about evaluation. A chance to put a face to the name. Only this wasn't the Kirkpatrick - Don, of four levels fame - but his son, Jim, who by soem strange coincidence also talks about evaluation. Jim looks older than me, so I knew Don must be really ancient, and he was. He recorded a video which was played back to the conference this morning. Still going strong at whatever age he is, he told the story of how he came up with the four levels of evaluation as part of his doctoral thesis fifty years ago, never imagining how it would be picked up and used all over the world. There clearly must be some money in it, otherwise Jim wouldn't be keeping the family business going.
I was interested to see how a video presentation would go down at the conference, and I have to admit it was pretty successful. As you can imagine, Don's a good speaker on this subject (he's had enough practice!) and held my attention well. Of course I didn't have to be in KL to see this - back at my PC would have been fine. On the other hand, I did think the head and shoulders format began to wear the audience down after a while, not because of Don, but because of the lack of visuals. To expect an audience that speaks English as a foreign language to follow along with voice alone is asking a bit much. This is a situation where slides really help.
A few thoughts on the Kirkpatrick model. It's 50 years old, so no-one's going to be seen as really cool for being a supporter, but I can't see any real problem with it. True, it's applied poorly, but so are many great tools, and that's certainly not Don's fault. All that's changed come 2007 is that we now have lots of interesting technological ways to conduct our evaluations. That doesn't make for better data or improve the likelihood that we'll go beyond level one, but at least we don't have to add up the figures by hand.
Come on Clive. You fly literally half way around the world to watch a video of a guy (presented by his son!) spouting 50 year old theory, that you admit is rarely used. Don't these conferences have anything better to offer?
ReplyDeleteIt ain't used because it's fatally flawed. It's over-engineered, statistically weak and leads people into spending valuable evaluation time and money on the wrong thing. It actually eats itself alive.
Kirkpatrick, like Honey and Mumford are just tired old ideas being regurgitated at tired old conferences.
I don't really get this. Kirkpatrick's four levels aren't a theory, they are a classification of four forms of evaluation. Because it merely describes these different forms, it cannot be over-engineered. I defy anyone to sit down now and create guidelines for the evaluation of training which do not say assentially the same thing.
ReplyDelete