In 1959, Donald Kirkpatrick outlined his now famous four levels of evaluation for training programs: reaction, learning, behavior and results. Building upon this foundation, Jack Phillips has since added a fifth level, that being the Return On Investment (ROI) produced by a training program using the financial formula:
Unfortunately, both the Kirkpatrick model and Phillip’s ROI formula may not provide the type of information needed by trainers and instructional designers to evaluate and improve training systems. To address this need a new model has been developed.
A New Training Systems Evaluation Model To begin, let’s start by reviewing the elements of a simple systems model. As illustrated below, we can represent any system as being composed of three basic elements.
