In today’s world of education, we talk a lot about things like collaboration, collective teacher efficacy, student self-assessment, feedback and much more as a part of effective educational practice, but when you have been in education for many years, as I have, many “effective educational practices” have proven not to be as effective as we once thought. How do we know that what we are doing today is not just another “fad” that will go away only to be replaced by the next one? How can we be confident that the things we are doing today will last and that schools where these ideas are implemented will truly grow and produce better prepared learners? I believe it is the quality of today’s research that proves that these practices will remain with us!
Today’s research is focused on student outcomes more than ever before. In 2009, John Hattie, a professor of education, published a revolutionary book titled, Visible Learning [Routledge, 2009] and followed with Visible Learning for Teachers [Routledge, 2012]. In his books, Hattie focused on the effect that factors involving the student, home, school, curriculum and so forth had on student achievement. He used research to assign an effect number to over 250 items that influence student learning, but what made this research so remarkable was the scope and magnitude of the research.
In the past, research was done in preparing to write a book or implement a new educational theory, but it was limited to a sub-population of students that may or may not have represented an accurate cross section of the entire student population. This research also often centered on teaching methods rather than student learning outcomes. As computers became more powerful and database software more sophisticated, the ability to do much larger sample sizes increaseed. Hattie was able to synthesize over 50,000 separate research studies involving over 150 million students into his intial database! This created a larger sample than had ever been done before and allowed for extremely accurate predictions of what did and did not have an influence on student learning. Hattie’s database continues to grow and remains the largest eductional database in the world.
It is rare to read an educational book published within the last ten years that doesn’t include Hattie effect numbers as part of its research. Because effect numbers have been assigned to most of the instructional strategies we employ in the classroom, it is now much easier to see the ones that work best in meeting the needs of all students. This research has allowed us to develop techniques that will stay with us and prove effective in improving student learning both now and in the future. This insures that current educational practice is more than just theory but is something that will be a part of the way educators approach student learning in the future as well.
When you see instructional strategies with a high Hattie effect size (more about that in a future blog) attached to it, you can be assured that it is more than a passing “fad.” It is likely to remain a part of educational practice for many years to come. The growth in scope and magnitude of educational research assures us that the techniques we learn today will still apply tomorrow.