This month, I saw an entry on an eLearning forum where the writer was discounting the importance of learning theory. Indeed, I would agree with the writer regarding the flavour of the month learning theories that pop up from time to time. Also, there is a resurgence of learning theories that the industry has discredited that seem to gain new momentum. I suspect the recent revival comes from people writing sarcastic posts about these discredited or unproven learning and people not thoroughly reading or understanding these posts' spirit. That's why I won't mention any of these unproven or discredited theories by name.
Instead, I stick to learning theories that have evidence of being factual or have something more than anecdotal evidence that they work or are practical choices for the industry to adopt. One such approach is Kirkpatrick's levels of evaluation. Donald Kirkpatrick suggested that there were four levels of training evaluation as follows:
Reaction
Learning
Behaviour, and
Results
Most notably was that the higher number you could achieve in assessing your learning design and implementation, the results proved to me more conclusive. To help you understand these levels consider the following examples of each level of evaluation.
Reaction or level 1 evaluations are the smile sheets we hand out at the close of instructor-led training. These are the surveys where we ask what learners of the training.
Learning or level 2 evaluations are the assessment that we administer to our learners. We usually require learners to obtain a particular score to prove that they are proficient in the knowledge we have taught them.
Behaviour or level 3 evaluations are when we visit the learner onsite and observe if they have implemented what they learned. You can also achieve this by surveying workplace supervisors.
Results or level 4 evaluations are when we look at the organizational results and see if actual improvement has occurred. You typically would compare this with the goals of training to measure if the training program was successful.
You should not rely on only one method of evaluation. Instead, you should use a combination of these evaluation levels to know if your training was truly effective. Also, you cannot attribute all aspects of these assessments to your training. For example, when we talk about level 4, we usually have to concede that things like seasonality, hiring and firing of workers and other items can affect results.
I seldom use level 1 evaluations in eLearning but prefer to use level 2 assessments to see if they have learned something in the course. Whenever possible, I also like to add a level 3 evaluation where I reach out to the employee's manager at around the 1-month post-training timeframe and determine if the employee has implemented the procedures learned in training. Level 4 is the most difficult to measure. While increased sales are easy to see, some results are not easily reportable and may require extensive research.