Moving Away from Work Performance

In revising my problem and purpose statement, along with fleshing out Chapter 1 of the dissertation, I got some sage words of wisdom from my mentor.

We want you to graduate

I liked the idea of measuring my dissertation to what Kirkpatrick would call the behavioral level or Level Three. However, as I know and my mentor pointed out to me again, this level of measurement is evasive and lengthy to determine. While I think understanding this is important, I also think graduation is important.

Even Kirkpatrick determined that Level Three is a difficult level to evaluate and can lead to false negatives. In the literature Kirkpatrick proffered that too many factors can mute a behavioral change and lead the researcher to issue a negative statement which might not be accurate. In fact, Kirkpatrick cautioned that influencers like a boss, workplace, personality, etc could give the impression that the training was ineffective when in fact learning took place, at Level Two.

So, I pulled back from work performance to get a faster and more accurate evaluation for the research. Is it cheating? Not at all. In fact, because the literature doesn’t have any determinations of effectiveness, this is a most appropriate level to evaluate. Future studies could include behavioral evaluation. In fact, that would make a nice second book for me…so don’t take my idea

I sent my revisions into my mentor and am looking forward to her feedback on the matter. This does add another component to my literature review but that isn’t going to be too bad. I jsut need to read more.

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