Visible Learning

By Maggie Hos-McGrane. Years ago when working in Amsterdam I became interested in Visible Thinking following workshops and presentations at the school where I was working.  
This weekend I was in Singapore at the IBO offices and over dinner one night I heard about Visible Learning (making the learning visible to the teacher). Professor John Hattie's study is one that involves metadata collected over a 15 year period from over 800 million students.  
It looked at the effect of various factors on student achievement such as the school, peers, the principal, teachers and so on and came to the conclusion that above all else students provide the key to improving their own performance. The factors that lead to higher achievement are things like self-reported grades and formative evaluation, whereas the things that lead to a lack of achievement are factors such as the summer vacation, television and above all else mobility.  
The study shows that class sizes, extra curricular activities, ability grouping and homework have very little effect on achievement.  I thought this was a pretty interesting finding since almost all the students I've taught over the past 25 years have been from families who are extremely mobile, but also because our intersessions programme has attempted to prevent the "brain drain" over the long summer holidays. I was also interested to read that homework has no impact on achievement (which is something I've long suspected). More...