There is an enormous amount of published educational research available, and it seems to support just about everyone's point of view. Hattie has done a lot of work gathering and summarising data to produce this book, which attempts to compare a large number of different ideas on an even footing. Aggregating research about education and turning it into actionable knowledge is really challenging, and the kind of project Hattie has undertaken is something very important. However, a number of issues keep it from being particularly useful.
There appears to have been no consideration of data quality or causality while putting the research together. Data quality is clearly an issue - the average effect size in all the interventions identified by Hattie is 0.4. It is highly implausible that trying anything at all will result in an expected improvement of 0.4 standard deviations when state & national average results barely change at all, and when they do they go down as often as they go up. Not attempting to deal with this leaves a reader to their own devices to guess what may or may not be relied on.
Causality is also very important. Students' expectations of their own grades are highly predictive, and this is accorded one of the largest "effect sizes" in the work. However, this is of little importance to teachers, because it is not the case that students' expectations are a major cause of their success or lack thereof - it's mostly the case that students, being intelligent people with access to a lot of information about their ability, motivation and the challenges of the curriculum, are able to make accurate predictions of their success in it. While this may be nice to know, and there may be a small causal component to student expectations, making no distinction between causal effects and things that just happen to be associated with success again leaves the reader to guess as to which things might actually be good ideas to try.
Finally, Hattie's written summaries are poor. There are few explanations of what went on in the studies that make up the data summarised and fewer connections from these studies to Hattie's grand theories of educations. Under the heading of "feedback", coming with one of the largest effect sizes identified, Hattie explains that he spend a long time misunderstanding feedback until he realised feedback from students to teachers was important. Why is he confused about the difference between teacher->student and student->teacher feedback? Why are they collected under the same heading? Most importantly, how does this help me work out how to incorporate more effective feedback into my classes... should I be spending most of my time on surveys?
Overall, it is a good concept, but I didn't actually get much from reading it. I think the Education Endowment Foundation's Teaching and Learning Toolkit is a much better execution of the same idea.
ISBN-13:
978-0415476188
ISBN-10:
0415476186
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Top international reviews
The Archeeros
Essential reading
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2012Verified Purchase
Amazon Customer
Good value
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 8, 2020Verified Purchase
AndyWicks
... teaching should read this - he has done an amazing job. These are the techniques that have been ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2014Verified Purchase
GrandBassa
Good read. Original work, but need more examination of why educational factors are more or less effective.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2016Verified Purchase
Amazon Customer
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 20, 2014Verified Purchase
sam m.
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 18, 2016Verified Purchase
Linda Greetham
Good
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2014Verified Purchase
SnowPharoah
Interesting book, but this is a starting point
Reviewed in Canada on August 1, 2016Verified Purchase
Dr. Volker Hagemeister
Große Ansprüche, viele Fehler bei Hattie
Reviewed in Germany on August 1, 2014Verified Purchase
DJC
Fascinating and relevant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2012Verified Purchase
zwergspitzora
an eye-opener!
Reviewed in Germany on July 8, 2013Verified Purchase
Amazon Customer
Ok
Reviewed in Canada on January 12, 2019Verified Purchase
light
Research based information
Reviewed in Canada on September 25, 2013Verified Purchase
Matthias Muth
Must have for german teachers
Reviewed in Germany on July 2, 2014Verified Purchase
G Smith
Came fast. Exactly as promised
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