Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement

by John Hattie

(d) when the student, not teacher, is in “control” of learning;

Students should be trained to develop group work experience.

Timmerman and Kruepke (2006) found that explanations (d = 0.66) and remediation (d = 0.73) are much more effective than just providing the correct answer (d = –0.11, see also Cohen & Dacanay, 1994). Lou, Abrami, and d'Apolloni (2001) found that effects were more positive when tasks were challenging (d = 0.13), than when moderately challenging (d = –0.34) or not challenging (d = –0.57).

There is no point asking students to engage in computer-assisted instruction activities unless there is some challenge.

language arts (d = 0.18), in high (d = 0.23) and low (d = 0.16) quality implementations of the multimedia method.

The overall effects are positive, but there are some important moderators.

Homework involving higher level conceptual thinking, and project based was the least effective.

they favored short, frequent homework that was closely monitored by the teachers.

Teaching does matter when it comes to students’ learning. The manner in which parents become involved may or may not make a difference.

There are marked differences in effect sizes between elementary (d = 0.15) and high school students (d = 0.64), which probably reflects the more advanced skills of studying involved in high school.

prescribing homework does not help students develop time management skills—

direct instruction,

demonstrates them by modeling, evaluates if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding, and re-telling them what they have told by tying it all together with closure.

These effective teaching strategies involve much cooperative pre-planning and discussion between teachers, optimizing peer learning, and require explicit learning intentions and success criteria.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (Eliot, 1934)

Fun but conservative

so often meta-analyses have been criticized as mere number crunching exercises, and a book based on more than 800 meta-analyses could certainly have been just that. That was not my intent. Instead, I aimed to build a model based on the theme of “visible teaching, visible learning” that not only synthesized existing literature but also permitted a new perspective on that literature.

Permit a new perspective with new data

It is the story that is meant to be the compelling contribution—it is my lens on this evidence.

it is hoped the story is bold enough to be potentially disprovable.

It is about teachers enabling students to do more than what teachers do unto them; it is the focus on imparting new knowledge and understanding and then considering and monitoring how students gain fluency and appreciation in this new knowledge and build conceptions of this knowing and understanding.

Well said

requires both accommodating and assimilating prior knowledge and conceptions,

Teachers need to know the learning intentions and success criteria of their lessons, know how well they are attaining these criteria for all students, and know where to go next in light of the gap between students’ current knowledge and understanding and the success criteria of: “Where are you going?”, “How are you going?”, and “Where to next?”.

There are no claims about additional structural resources, although to achieve the above it helps not to have the hindrance of a lack of resources.

Certainly, children from the more advantaged families were the major beneficiaries of the voucher system (and loudest advocates). With few exceptions, we have to teach all in front of us.

to over learn some skills to thus allow cognitive resources to be freed for other tasks—

“reflective teaching” too often ignores that such reflection needs to be based on evidence and not on post-hoc justification.

Students’ on-task talk was about the same things. When students were asked what they were thinking, “their most common response was that they were thinking about how to get finished quickly or how to the answer with the least possible effort” (Nuthall, 2005, p. 918).

opportunities. It takes “three or four experiences involving interaction with relevant information for a new knowledge construct to be created in working memory and then transferred to long-term memory” (Nuthall, 2000, p. 93).

they “learn” that their ability to acquire knowledge is inferior.

Nuthall argued that teachers should focus on direct observation of the realities of student experience and the processes that students experience in developing knowledge and skill.

active and guided instruction is much more effective than unguided, facilitative instruction.

providing only minimal guidance during instruction does not work.

The level of instruction is adjusted to meet the needs of middle to high achieving students, and the pacing of instruction based on feedback from lower achieving students. “As a result, the entire student body suffers, so that fast-paced achievers are not sufficiently stimulated, whereas low achievers may feel frustrated; decreased motivation and off-task behaviors are likely to follow” (Ben-Ari & Eliassy, 2003, p. 145).

progress depends on the teacher-directed methods and tasks.

A recent major review by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000) of how people learn identified three major principles, which are consistent with the findings in these meta-analyses. The first was that students come into classes with preconceptions about how the world works, and teachers need to engage with this initial understanding otherwise the students may fail to grasp the new concepts and information.

Second, for teachers to develop student competence, their students must have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, understand the ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.

Third, a meta-cognitive approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them. The key questions are: “Where ...

learning is primarily a social activity;

This means that teachers need to be “adaptive learning experts” (Bransford et al., 2000; Hatano & Inagaki, 1986), who not only use many of the effective strategies outlined in these chapters but also have high levels of flexibility that allow them to innovate when routines are not enough.

Looking at u serfass

“Adaptive experts also know how to continuously expand their expertise, restructuring their knowledge and competencies to meet new challenges” (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 11).

Feedback tells people what is; goals tell them what is desirable. Feedback involves information; goals involve evaluation. Goals inform individuals as to what type or level of performance is to be attained so that they can direct and evaluate their actions and efforts accordingly. Feedback allows them to set reasonable goals and to track their performance in relating to their goals, so that adjustments in effort, direction, and even strategy can be made as needed. Goals and feedback can be considered a paradigm case of the joint effect of motivation and cognition controlling action.

Eloquent

Throughout the chapters of this book, the importance of relationships, trust, caring, and safety have been emphasized, as has the importance of teachers choosing worthwhile and appropriately challenging tasks.

Any recommendations about “what works best” invoke claims about cultural matters that influence and drive classroom interaction and discourse patterns. Consider, for example, the place of “talk” in classrooms.

Somewhat surprisingly there was no preponderance of evidence supporting the importance of subject or pedagogical content knowledge.

Emphasis on soft skills

Knowing is an activity, not a thing, in this third sense, and it is reciprocally constructed in the individual-environment-teacher interaction and not easily objectively defined by a one-off test (Barab & Roth, 2006).

Fire

Any innovation, any teaching program, and all teachers should be aiming to demonstrate that the effects on student achievement should exceed d = 0.40. This h-point is not only attainable by many innovations but is the average, not the maximum, effect. Many students experience gains of d = 0.40, primarily because of excellent teaching; why cannot all?!

“Yes, some students are not so able but that is more a function of what they brought to the class and not a consequence of my teaching”. It turns out that these claims are among the weakest of all.

found 80 percent of students went backwards in some schools—in mathematics in grade 9, where they first encountered algebra, the students struggled to the point that they become disengaged from mathematics, developed beliefs about their lowered performance in mathematics, and often dropped out of mathematics (Hattie, et al. 2007).

Students are more discriminating about teachers and, as noted in Chapter 7, Irving (2004) demonstrated that they are often accurate in their discrimination.

In the search for how science progresses, Karl Popper (1963) claimed that a key was the search for disconfirmation (as so often we see evidence of our success everywhere).

“what works best” for students also applies to “what works best” for teachers.