Good Morning all

As promised, I will continue blogging and sharing with you what I am reading or learning about in the field of education.

This past week, I started reading Visible Learning by John Hattie. In this research based book, Hattie summarizes 800 meta-analyses and many more individual research studies that focus on teaching practices that have the greatest impact on student learning. Among other statistical measures, Hattie looks at an effect size - in particular effect size that is above the moderate size of .40 that you will see from general but not outstanding teaching practices. He presents strategies that have an effect size of .60 and above, which is quite significant.

One of the most effective and powerful strategies is teacher feedback. Students need to know how they are doing - at any given time. In addition, they need to have developed the comfort level and trust in the educator to be able to ask questions freely without risk of embarrassment. This leads to the importance of classroom environment in student achievement.

Feedback to teachers is also critical so that theycan gage how students are progressing and can modify and adjust their teaching according to individual accomplishments and/or challenges.

One of the most effective classroom strategies with an effect size of .76 (very high) is reciprocal teaching. The process of mediated learning, scaffolding instruction and using metacognitive strategy instruction in the developement of reading comprehension is extrememly valuable.

I will write more about reciprocal teaching and other visible learning strategies that have a significant impact on student learning.

Have a great week-end
Karen