A major contribution is a fascinating benchmark/dashboard for comparing many innovations in teaching and schools. Visible Learning: Feedback brings together two internationally known educators and merges Hattie’s world-famous research expertise with Clarke’s vast experience of classroom practice and application, making this book an essential resource for teachers in any setting, phase or country. Although the current evidence based fad has turned into a debate about test scores, this book is about using evidence to build and defend a model of teaching and learning. A major message is that what works best for students is similar to what works best for teachers - an attention to setting challenging learning intentions, being clear about what success means, and an attention to learning strategies for developing conceptual understanding about what teachers and students know and understand. A model of teaching and learning is developed based on the notion of visible teaching and visible learning. Areas covered include the influence of the student, home, school, curricula, teacher, and teaching strategies. The research involves many millions of students and represents the largest ever evidence based research into what actually works in schools to improve learning. It builds a story about the power of teachers, feedback, and a model of learning and understanding. The Visible Learning website has several interactive graphics to illustrate these influences.This unique and ground-breaking book is the result of 15 years research and synthesises over 800 meta-analyses on the influences on achievement in school-aged students. He repeated the method of ranking influencers using the “hinge point” measurement which allowed him to rank the effects of 195 influences on a scale. John Hattie developed a way of synthesizing various influences in different meta-analyses according to their effect size (Cohen’s d). In the 2015 Visible Learning, Hattie rated influence effects by increasing the number of meta-analyses from 800 to 1200. It was the effect size of 0,4, a numerical conversion that Hattie termed as his “hinge point,” that became the effect size average. In the 2009 edition of Visible Learning, Hattie suggested that an effect size of 0,2 could be relatively small, while an effect size of 0,6 could be large. The greater the size of the effect, the greater the influence. The size effect could be numerically converted for purposes of comparison, for example, an influencer’s effect size of 0 shows that the influence has no effect on student achievement. Aggregating the data that was generated from these meta-analyses, Hattie determined the size of the effect each influence had on student learning.

Visible Learning by John Hattie