What exactly does the research say about authentic learning methods, which are the methods that we believe make learning irresistible, such as service learning, inquiry, and PBL, to name just a few? John Hattie, a scholar from Australia, has a few answers for us!
First, some backstory will set the scene. In the 2010s, Hattie grabbed the attention of U.S. educators, when he produced a list of the top influences on student learning (e.g., feedback, homework, even television!, etc.) and determined the strength of each with a method called meta-analysis. He ranked these influences and referred to them as ‘visible learning.’ His updated site from 2023 is even better!
The core of his work is a statistic called the average effect size. In statistics and Hattie’s research, an average effect size of .4 equates to about a year’s worth of learning for a year of school. If an effect size is greater than .4, learners will grow even more than expected in a year!
Ba-tatatatatata! So, drum roll, please?! What does Hattie and his team’s latest research conclude about some of the popular “authentic learning” methods? According to their investigation, inquiry models have a .53 mean effect size. Service learning? .56…inductive teaching like PBL? .60, and discussion? .80. Thank you, John Hattie and your team, for giving educators the hard data to back up what they’ve known all along – authentic learning is indeed irresistible!
John Hattie’s research, mostly and famously, explores education research and determines the mean effect sizes, when possible, of the factors related to learning, such as teaching strategies, technology, curriculum, etc… As of 2021, Hattie and his team had examined the findings of a whopping 132,000 studies, comprising an astounding 300 million students!
Here’s one example about ‘feedback.’ Hattie analyzed 1,000 research studies and hundreds of relationships between learning and feedback, and he discovered the average effect size of feedback on learning was .51! This means that getting and using feedback leads to a lot of learning in a year of school! The big implications of Hattie and his team’s research is that teaching doesn’t always map onto learning, and some kinds of teaching or instructional strategies map onto learning better than others.
The beauty of an average effect size is that it can give us an overall picture of the evidence on a strategy or method. It misses, however, the nuances about our schools, communities, and teaching experiences, but stories from the classroom and other kinds of research help fill in those gaps. So, use Hattie’s research to generate your own questions about learning and your impact on learning. We think that’s the gem in Hattie’s work - prompting us to reflect on our impact on learning!
You can check out the summaries and the mean effect sizes of all the studies they investigated at Hattie and colleagues’ amazing site: https://www.visiblelearningmetax.com/
For more reading about this topic, consider the recent book,: 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success
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