An interview with Donald Kirkpatrick: The father of evaluation

Like many of the enduring greats, Donald Kirkpatrick has withstood the test of time and refined, tuned and tweaked a model of evaluation that he first published back in 1959. Annie Hayes talks to Kirkpatrick about the model that has defined his very existence.

His story begins back at the University of Wisconsin: "I was teaching and I thought to myself 'as long as I'm running seminars why don't I evaluate them'," says Kirkpatrick who humbly admits that all he really wanted to do, to begin with, was to evaluate the reaction. "I found though this wasn't enough, I wanted to know if they'd learned anything but then that didn't seem enough either. I needed to know if they'd taken anything back to their jobs, whether they changed their behaviour and got positive results," explains Kirkpatrick.