Browsing by Author "Nikula, Iida"

Organizations invest a lot of resources in personnel training and therefore it is important that these training programs are effective. A comprehensive evaluation is however needed in order to gain understanding of how training achieves its objectives and contributes to human resources development. Inspired by this need, it became the purpose of this study to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of a certain personnel training. The aim was to examine how effective the training is based on the participants’ reactions, learning and training transfer readiness. These three elements arose from the theory background of training effectiveness and the Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation-model, which was chosen to form the framework for effectiveness evaluation. Also Pineda’s ideas on the pedagogical consistency of training were included in the theoretical framework of the study. This study was a mixed methods case study. The data was collected from the intervention- and control group as a two-time repeated measure. In between the measures, the intervention group participated in the training and the control group worked normally. There were 27 participants, from which 17 participated in the intervention group and 10 in the control group. The data was collected using questionnaires and a knowledge test. For qualitative analysis abductive content analysis was used. The quantitative change in answers between measures was analysed with Wilcoxon’s signed mark test and related samples t-test. The answers of intervention and control group were compared by using Mann-Whitney’s u-test and the analysis of variance (ANOVA). The main result was that the studied training provoked desirable effects. In the intervention group, participants’ interest in the topic, experienced importance of topic and the experi-ence of knowing the basics improved significantly. Also the knowledge about the topic in-creased significantly. In the control group, no significant differences between measurement times were found. Overall the reactions to the training were mainly positive and participants felt that their learning process was quite well supported. In addition to positive results, areas of improvement were also found. These were the support on active processing of information, slowing down the pace and changing the way presentation material is used.