Image from: http://dibaustralia.com.au

John Hattie is a lead researcher in education who has poured his energy into synthesising over 800 meta-analyses from around the world to work out and compare where influences of teaching and learning sit on a single continuum. He has published this information in his books, Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers.

Rather than changing things in our schools because we qualitatively or airy-fairily “think” something might be better, we can actually have the evidence to support or disprove ideas.

Evidence-based education!!!!!!

Below is embedded an introduction to his Visible Learning research, from the website: http://visiblelearningplus.com

Hattie found studied 6 areas that contribute to learning: the student, the home, the school, the curricula, the teacher, and teacher and learning approaches. He found 138 influences that are related to learning outcomes which range from very positive effects to very negative effects. The average effect size of all the interventions included in his study was 0.40. This effect size of 0.40 has therefore become what he calls a hinge point and influences are compared to this average to decide whether they have a positive or negative effect, and how influential they are. The reason for his publications being called ‘Visible Learning” is because he concluded that the key to making a difference in the education of our students was to make teaching and learning visible.

His influences and results are constantly being updated. See the interactive visualisation: http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/

Image from: http://visible-learning.org

Below are two videos of John Hattie showing some highlights of a talk given discussing his findings, shared from: Visible Learning.

These are a good starting point for understanding better what actually works in education!