The greatest influence on student learning - John Hattie

What has the greatest influence on student learning?

Yesterday at a professional learning day we looked at the work by John Hattie. Hattie, a Professor of Education at Auckland University in New Zealand has published impressive papers involving meta analysis on student learning. Meta-analysis is commonly found in medicine and epidemiology, where for example, it is used to synthesize the effects of drugs in clinical trials. Hattie uses meta-analysis to provide a birds-eye view of effective education across the world. Hattie’s meta-analysis is fascinating in its sheer breadth. His work draws on "a total of about 800 meta-analyses, which encompassed 52,637 studies, and provided 146,142 effect sizes [...] these studies are based on many millions of students" (Hattie, 2009; 15).

Hattie's bottom line is the "effect size". An effect size of "1" indicates that a particular approach to teaching or technique advanced the learning of the students in the study by one standard deviation above the mean. So an effect size of "1" is very good indeed.

• Reverse effects in red are self-explanatory, and below 0.0
• Developmental effects are 0.0 to 0.15, and the improvement a child may be expected to show in a year simply through growing up, without any schooling. (These levels are determined with reference to countries with little or no schooling.)
• Teacher effects "Teachers typically can attain d=0.20 to d=0.40 growth per year—and this can be considered average"  ...but subject to a lot of variation.
• Desired effects are those above d=0.40 which are attributable to the specific interventions or methods being researched.

You can see in the normal distribution below, that the mean effect size is 0.4 and the desired effect size is therefore greater than 0.4. Very few effects are above 1.0, called the 'very good' category.

I included a detail of the top 20 or so areas with the most pronounced effect on students learning below. Formative assessment (assessment 'for learning' and 'as learning') matters as much as I thought it would, with an effect of 0.9. I know that effective feedback, delivered at the right time and in the right way enables me as a teacher to change I am doing AND helps the student understand their achievement of the learning goals.




What surprised me in the list above, was that student self-expectations rank the highest in effect, with an impact of 1.44, and that study skills appear more than 20 lines down the list with an effect size of 0.59. 


References
Hattie's two research papers, Influences on Student Learning and Teachers make a Difference, explore what it is that really makes a difference to learning in our classrooms, and the difference between experienced teachers and expert teachers. His book Visible Learning synthesised these results. Hattie's webpage brings together the freely available online resources related to John Hattie’s Visible Learning research  http://visible-learning.org/.