Invited reaction: Reaction to holton article

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read the title to Holton's article, "The Flawed Four-Level Evaluation Model." After I read the article, I still didn't know how to feel. But when I thought about how Holton had "proved"— through various research papers—that the Kirkpatrick model wasn't really a model at all but only a "taxonomy," I decided not to do either. I v U admit that I was a little upset when he listed the six components of a model described by Klimoski (1991) and Dubin (1996) and then stated that "the four-level model' does not meet any of these criteria." He might at least have said that it met the second criterion of "relationships between the units" because my model (or my taxonomy, if you prefer) does show the relationships among the four levels. I admit that Holton's article is a scholarly work: Certainly cites to other articles are plentiful. Many of them have nothing to do with evaluation, but the list is impressive! The funny thing is that I personally have never called my framework "a model." Someone else described it that way For example, in a case study presented in Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels. (Kirkpatrick, 1994), Dave Basarab, head of the evaluation department at Motorola stated, "Motorola University has adopted the Kirkpatrick model for training evaluation" throughout the world. In another case study presented in the book, the authors from CIGNA Corporation called my model "the CIGNA CMD&T Impact Model." The case study by Patrick O'Hara of First Union National Bank referred to it as "the Four-Level Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model." And Eric Freitag of Intel Corporation wrote an article for the book entitled "Implementing the Kirkpatrick Model as an Up-Front Analysis and Evaluation Tool." My purpose in offering these illustrations is to demonstrate that, in the real world where training evaluation takes place, the word "model" is commonly used to describe a systematic way of doing something. It may or may not meet the six criteria listed by Klimoski. Personally I don't care whether my work is called a model or a taxonomy as long as it helps to clarify the meaning of