Research: what makes the difference?

Professor John Hattie's research review synthesises research that tells us which factors, and which teaching methods really make the difference to student acheivement.
Download an explanatory paper about Hattie's work here
Download Hattie's original paper 'Influences on Student Learning' here
There are many other useful papers on Professor Hattie's site, follow the links on the left of his webpages: http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/staff/j.hattie

How do we know what works in schools and colleges?
There is one obvious way to find out..... try a teaching strategy out on an experimental group, and have a control group which is being taught without this teaching strategy, but is otherwise identical. Then you compare the learning of these two groups. How much more the experimental group learns than the control group, is called the effect size:
An effect size of 1.0 is equivalent to a two grade leap at GCSE
An effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to a one grade leap at GCSE.

There are a number of teaching strategies that add more than one grade to students learning. Professor John Hattie has collected average effect sizes from more than 500 reasearch reviews or 'meta-studies'. He then put these average effect sizes in order to create a table of what variables or teaching methods ahve the greatest effect on achievement. In effect this summarises practically all the effective control group research done internationally to date.

Top of Hattie's list is feedback, go to the feedback page to learn more about this very important variable.

The teaching method that gets to the top of his table is 'direct instruction', this is not what it sounds like! While it is very teacher controlled, the students are very active and are held very accountable for their learning. Find out more:
Download 'Direct Instruction' here

Feedback requires the learner to do something active first, for example to answer some questions, do an exercsise, write an essay, or make something. This is 'active learning'. go to the active learning page to getsome ideas onsome new active methods.

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