Visible Learning: A Synthesis Of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating To Achievement (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
I have known of John Hattie for about a decade, having read his research and heard him speak on a number of occasions. John is always provocative and passionate about good teaching and good schools. This book shows the depth of scholarship that underpins his conclusions. The trick, as always, is how one takes it into one;s own school and how one implements it in one's own teaching. Nevertheless, a brilliant read for the data-obsessives like me, and high recommended for all school leaders. If this book isn't important to you, change jobs. . . . Because I'm a dork and read things like this for fun. :)I'm going to go ahead and review this one even though I technically haven't finished it. It's not really the kind of book you read all at once. It'll be something I dip into off and on. I don't know much about statistics, so I can't explain all the terms, but this is obviously John Hattie's life's work. He has synthesized thousands of educational research meta-analyses into one place -- an impressive task. As I understand it, a meta-analysis uses statistics to combine and compare results of many studies on the same topic. It provides a common language to discuss these different studies so we can tell what's really effective and not.The end product is fascinating -- he ranks 138 different topics within education related to school policies, family, and teaching from most to least effective. Some are common sense -- students suffer when they move around between multiple schools regularly. Some are surprising. For example, Hattie could find no meta-analysis that supports using retention as an intervention method for students. It apparently has all kinds of negative effects on kids but no positives. However, schools use this all the time. Conversely, he could find no negative effects from accelerating learning for gifted students (allowing them the flexibility to move through school more quickly), but schools rarely allow this. (Actually, more frustrating than surprising.) There are also, of course, a lot of strategies and policies that really make no difference whatsoever, positive or negative.Hattie definitely has his own opinions about what he's found in the research and doesn't hesitate to express them, which actually makes this book a lot more interesting to read than you would expect. He offers nice explanations and summaries to tie everything together and explain the numbers more clearly. So far I've read through about 30 of the meta-analysis summaries, and I have a lot of things I need to look into more. Once I've done that, I'll come back to this resource to find my next ideas for research. It's not exactly a high-budget production -- some of the pages are poorly printed and kind of a mess, but it's a tremendously important addition to the field of education, and I expect to come back to it frequently over the coming years.
What do You think about Visible Learning: A Synthesis Of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating To Achievement (2009)?
This book is my best friend at the moment. Have finished it, but will be re-visiting frequently.
—lexie171170
With regards Education Stats, this book is the Bible. 'Nuff said.
—shino_ching
