Evaluation 101: How Leaders Should Evaluate Success

Why is it important to understand these 4 levels of outcomes?

When evaluating the success of any program or intervention, it’s important to think about how to measure that success. A simple model talks about four levels of evaluation.

1. Reaction criteria. This is the simplest level of evaluation. It asks the affected individuals what they thought of the program — their reactions.
2. Knowledge criteria. This focuses on what people involved in the program actually learn or are able to recall.
3. Behavioral criteria assess whether the program led to a change in behavior by individuals affected by the program
4. Results criteria focuses on the bottom line of whether the program actually paid off for the organization — led to increased income or return on investment.

Let’s look at a simple example. You are implementing a customer service training program for your team. Reaction criteria would ask team members what they thought about the program — whether they liked it and thought it was useful. Knowledge criteria would focus on whether they actually retained any of the learning from the program, so you might give them a brief quiz. Behavioral criteria would measure whether team members are subsequently creating better customer service (i.e., reduced customer complaints, observing more “service with a smile”). Results criteria would look at increase in customer sales or increase in the number of repeat customers.

You can see that this is a sort of hierarchy of evaluation, ranging from the least impactful (reaction criteria) to the most (results criteria).

For Development: Think of how you or your organization have evaluated the success of different interventions in the past. Which level of criteria have you used? How can you do a better job of evaluating programs to ensure that you are getting the results you want? Spend some time focusing on these different levels and you can improve your evaluation of success. This hierarchy of evaluation criteria is something you want to refer to when evaluating the success of any program or project.