Education: What works and what does not, with Professor John Hattie

Evaluating the quality of teaching and learning in our schools, and assessing the effectiveness of our school systems and primary education frameworks is an important research area that focuses on questions such as “what works and what does not work in our schools”. An important aspect of this research is to evaluate the impact of factors such as class size, homework, use of digital technologies, duration of academic year, teaching very bright and weak learners in same cohorts on the quality of teaching and learning in our schools. Such research also focuses on measuring the effect-size of these and other factors on the performance of our education systems. Professor John Hattie has spent fifteen years synthesizing over 60,000 studies, involving about a quarter of a billion students. This meta-analysis – analysis of analyses – focuses on the questions that what works and what does not work in our schools and what matters in teaching. This is perhaps the biggest ever evidence-based research project in education. In this podcast I discuss with Professor Hattie the origin of this project, the studies that he has used in this project, and the approach that he has adopted to combine and consolidate data from these studies to perform this meta-analysis. We discuss in detail the findings of this meta-analysis. We also discuss the impact of “out of school factors” such as home environment on the performance of young learners. We discuss the concept of “Visible Learning” that Professor Hattie presents in his books and presentations, and try to explore how the education at primary level must evolve and should be aligned with the needs and expectations of twenty-first century learners. In his books Professor Hattie discusses eight mind frames or ways of thinking that must underpin every process and action in schools and school systems; I ask Professor Hattie to describe these eight mind frames in detail. An important finding that Professor Hattie highlights in his presentations is that the “biggest effect on student learning occurs when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and when students become their own teachers”; we discuss this statement in detail. Professor Hattie highlights that increase use of internet and communication technologies in schools presents an opportunity for the parents to get more involved in school affairs. Professor John Hattie is a researcher in the field of education, and is the Director of the Melbourne Education and Research Institute at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include performance indicators, models of measurements and evaluation of teaching and learning. He has written more than four hundred articles on these and related topics. His two very interesting books on these topics are: “Visible Learning” and “Visible Learning for Teachers”.