Discussion: Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation Think about a professional development program you participated in as practicing nurse. Did you find the training to be engaging? What new knowledge and skills did you acquire? More importantly, were you able to successfully apply these new skills on the job and did they lead to successful outcomes for your organization and your patients? Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation serve as a model for guiding nurse educators in developing evaluations that provide answers to these questions. Photo Credit: Getty Images For this Discussion, you will revisit the learning outcome and objectives you created in Part 2 to serve as the basis for developing evaluation approaches for your students. When developing evaluations, there are many things to consider. First, your evaluations must align to the learning outcome and objectives you created. This requires a close examination of the wording of your outcome and objectives to ensure they are well defined and measurable. If it’s not clear how the student should be evaluated, you may need to consider further refinement to your outcomes and objectives before moving on. Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation are another important consideration of educational design. Their purpose is to measure the effectiveness of professional development at the student and organizational level, with each level offering a more precise measure. For our purposes, we will just consider Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluations at the individual student level. For this Discussion, you will analyze evaluation approaches across Kirkpatrick’s four levels and ensure alignment of evaluations to learning outcomes and objectives. This Discussion will give you an opportunity to receive feedback from your colleagues in preparation for your Module 3 Assignment. To prepare: Review the Resources for this week related to alignment of evaluations to learning objectives/outcomes and Kirkpatrick’s Levels of Evaluation. Review the learning objectives you developed for Part 2 of your Module 3 Assignment and select one for this Discussion. Consider how you would evaluate one of your learning objectives at the first three levels of Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation. By Day 3 of Week 7 Post the learning objective you have selected and then explain approaches for creating evaluations at the first three levels of Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation.