This post is brought to you by your padawan blogger, Daniel Liestman, a graduate student in the University of St. Francis’ (Joliet, IL) MS in Training and Development program.

Assessing the training of health care professionals to become proficient with TEDEI (Training in Early Detection for Early Intervention), a screening instrument for cerebral palsy in infants, involved the first three Kirkpatrick levels. Participants in the video-based e-learning course reacted to a 6 question Likert scale and free text responses. Most responses were at the highest level of satisfaction. However, questions about improved personal knowledge and anticipated improved clinical practice only scored at the second highest level of satisfaction. A pre- and post-test of learning showed an improvement of 23.1%. Twenty-three interviewees reported improvement in their behavior in working with parents, improvement in confidence, and success with other telehealth assessments. 

Understandably, Officer, et. al.  (2023) did not attempt a Level 4 assessment.  Kirkpatrick’s model comes from an era of internal in-house training where organizational impact was considered the capstone to a logical progression. In an era of distributed, asynchronous training where not all members of an organization participate assessing Level 4 is challenging. This then begs the question why would an organization support one person taking an online course? The assumption is that the learner will pass the information along to colleagues.  The idea that if you want to master a topic; teach it applies. If the online learners passed along their newfound knowledge, the measures of the 3 Levels could become their Level 4 assessment.

Officer, Johnson, M., Blickwedel, J., Reynolds, A., Pearse, R., Pearse, J., & Basu, A. P. (2023). Evaluation of the Training in Early Detection for Early Intervention (TEDEI) e-learning course using Kirkpatrick’s method. BMC Medical Education, 23(1), 129–129. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04113-7