Kirkpatrick, Donald L.

Donald L. Kirkpatrick (March 15, 1924 – May 9, 2014) was Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and a past president of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). He is best known for creating a highly influential 'four level' model for training course evaluation, which served as the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation in 1954. Kirkpatrick's ideas were published to a broader audience in 1959 in a series of articles in the US Training and Development Journal, but they are better known from a book he published in 1994 entitled Evaluating Training Programs. Other books that he has written on training evaluation include Transferring Learning to Behavior and Implementing the Four Levels. His work is carried on by his eldest son, Dr. Jim Kirkpatrick, and Wendy Kayser Kirkpatrick, and Vanessa Alzate.