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effect sizes

John Hattie and the magical power of prediction

2016-01-29T09:47:09+00:00January 28th, 2016|research|

"Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous." Hyman G. Rickover — Speech to US Naval Post Graduate School, March 16, 1954 In this post I picked up on a rather odd comment made by Professor Hattie at a recent conference: ...tests don’t tell kids about how much they’ve learnt. Kids are very, very good at predicting how well they’ll do in a test.” Are they? In my response I argued that he's wrong: Most students are novices – they don’t yet know much about the subject they’re studying. Not only do they not know much, they’re unlikely to know the value of what they do know [...]

The Unit of Education

2015-01-10T21:12:36+00:00January 8th, 2015|Featured|

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. Lord Kelvin A lot of education research is an attempt to measure the effects of teaching (or teachers) on learning (or pupils.) But is this actually possible? Let’s first think about measurement in a very practical sense. Schools limit admission based on a sometimes very strict catchment area – if you want to make sure that your children attend a particular school you need to live within the catchment. For some very oversubscribed schools this can be a radius of less than a mile. If I measure the distance between my front door and [...]

Old Hat(tie)? Some things you ought to know about effect sizes

2014-05-17T17:39:45+01:00January 24th, 2014|myths|

Ever since Hattie published Visible Learning back in 2009 the Effect Size has been king. For those of you who don't know, an effect size is a mechanism for comparing the relative merits of different interventions. Hattie pointed out that everything that a teacher does will have some effect but that there will also be an opportunity cost: if you're investing in time in one type of intervention you will be neglecting other types of intervention which might have a greater impact. He therefore used effect sizes to try to establish what has the greatest influence on student learning so that we [...]

Learning Journeys

2011-09-21T22:00:27+01:00September 21st, 2011|learning|

Last month I wrote a post asking whether there was a point to starters. Luckily for me, Darren Mead got in touch to tell me about what he has termed Learning Journeys. Ever since I've been absolutely smitten. The idea is incredibly simple: at the beginning of the lesson, provide students with a visual representation of the learning which will take place during the lesson. That's it. A visual learning objective. Geoff Petty in his book Evidence Based Teaching shows that using this strategy along with a traditional learning objective plus an activity which links to students' prior learning has an effect [...]

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