In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On March 13 2018 07:52 Simberto wrote: "I would argue raising standards and holding people back a few times would help."
I would like to mention that this is in no way supported by empirical evidence. Holding people back a grade actually reduces the amount of stuff they learn during their next year. Retention is roughly as bad as corporal punishment (very bad) at home with regards to its effect on learning, and way worse than for example television at home.
This is interesting to me. Do you happen to have sources I can read regarding the supposed detrimental effects that holding students back a grade has on their learning? I'm particularly interested in math education as an example, since I feel these negative effects are counterintuitive. Considering the years of math build on each other, I would think it's of the utmost importance for high school students to have a strong foundation in arithmetic and algebra before starting the higher maths, even if that means spending another year (or summer school) on algebra. Students who have weak algebra skills will struggle even more in trigonometry and calculus, for example. You think it would be worse for them to spend more time on algebra than to be pushed through to the next math? Even if they're failing?
As I read Simberto's comment, it seems fairly misleading. I think what he is saying is "if you have a first grader and make them repeat first grade, they will learn less in the following year if they repeat first grade vs. going to second grade." That seems obvious and kind of useless. Of course they will. If they learned 70% of the first grade material the first time they went through and got up to 90% the second time through, they only learned 20% of a year's worth the second time! That kid could have gone on to second grade and learned 50% of a new year's worth of stuff.
Of course that is the wrong comparison. What we care about is how that kid does in second grade after a repeat year vs. without.
On March 13 2018 07:52 Simberto wrote: "I would argue raising standards and holding people back a few times would help."
I would like to mention that this is in no way supported by empirical evidence. Holding people back a grade actually reduces the amount of stuff they learn during their next year. Retention is roughly as bad as corporal punishment (very bad) at home with regards to its effect on learning, and way worse than for example television at home.
This is interesting to me. Do you happen to have sources I can read regarding the supposed detrimental effects that holding students back a grade has on their learning? I'm particularly interested in math education as an example, since I feel these negative effects are counterintuitive. Considering the years of math build on each other, I would think it's of the utmost importance for high school students to have a strong foundation in arithmetic and algebra before starting the higher maths, even if that means spending another year (or summer school) on algebra. Students who have weak algebra skills will struggle even more in trigonometry and calculus, for example. You think it would be worse for them to spend more time on algebra than to be pushed through to the next math? Even if they're failing?
As I read Simberto's comment, it seems fairly misleading. I think what he is saying is "if you have a first grader and make them repeat first grade, they will learn less in the following year if they repeat first grade vs. going to second grade." That seems obvious and kind of useless. Of course they will. If they learned 70% of the first grade material the first time they went through and got up to 90% the second time through, they only learned 20% of a year's worth the second time! That kid could have gone on to second grade and learned 50% of a new year's worth of stuff.
Of course that is the wrong comparison. What we care about is how that kid does in second grade after a repeat year vs. without.
I think if someone learned 70% of the material, having a system that can't get them the other 30% without repeating the 70% they already know is failing that student.
I think you are right that the statistic as presented is less substantial than implied but I don't think an excellent performance in 2nd grade would mean that holding the kid back was a great choice either.
To think this might’ve been our president. We had two divisive candidates face each other in the general.
"Trashes." She laid out a bunch of facts about economic output and the framing of the campaigns that are unflattering to the people who happen to live in rural areas that take up a lot of space and like to think that they're "Real America." Trump's campaign was pessimistic and looking backwards. Clinton's campaign was optimistic and looking forwards. And the counties Trump won are responsible for a smaller part of the GDP than the counties Clinton won.
Instead, we have President Donald "Bad Hombres, Grab Her By the Pussy, The Media is an Enemy of the American People" Trump.
One of these two people orders of magnitude more divisive than the other.
Trump has his base, and has been literally separating the rest of the country into specific demographic out groups who are hazards to or enemies of his base's idea of "The American Way of Life (TM)" And it is having real effects of splitting society apart.
So yes, I do think every so often that she - not 'this', she's a person. I don't that anyone here has referred to Donald Trump with pronouns such as 'this,' 'it,' or 'that.' Not letting that rhetorical trick slide - might have been our President. It would have been a lot better than the shitshow of corruption, greed, incompetence, and tantrums that is the Trump presidency so far.
Also, we would have been spared a tax plan that is likely to send the US as a whole the way of Kansas and as of late Louisiana. Empirically, cutting taxes in the way that the GOP did doesn't spur growth, and just results in massive budget deficits.
Clinton might not have been a good president, but being better than Trump is such a low bar that we probably could have installed a wax statue of Trump in the Oval Office and on the whole it would have done a better job than Trump has so far. Clinton clears the bar of "better than Trump" easily.
To think this might’ve been our president. We had two divisive candidates face each other in the general.
I just love the shear unabashed neoliberalness of the "I won the places that represent 2/3rds of Americas GDP".
It's not a great statement, but it makes a point in terms that most conservatives would probably claim matters to them, given their love of throwing around terms like "personal responsibility," "hard work," and such. "Conservative" America is fundamentally failing to keep up with "Liberal" America economically as well as demographically. In every way that matters except majority control of large swathes of barely populated land, conservatives are becoming less and less relevant.
Well, I'm sure they're aware of that, too - Thus Trump and the dream of making America like it was when they were important and relevant.
And yes, I'm overgeneralizing. Whoops. When Trump apologizes for lumping the media into a basket labeled "Enemy of the American People," I'll apologize for lumping conservatives into a basket labeled "Increasingly Irrelevant."
It is worth underlining, in a week dominated by reminders of the skulduggery that helped send Donald Trump to the White House a year ago, that the main reason for his victory was democratic. Mr Trump persuaded about 7m people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, most of them white, working-class and malcontent, to vote for him. Many had not voted Republican before.
Obama-Trump voters represented only about 4% of the electorate. But because they were concentrated in the swing states of the industrial north-east and mid-west, they outweighed Mrs Clinton’s more modest gains with groups such as the college-educated whites who migrated from the Republicans to the Democrats. They are the main reason Mr Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states that sealed his victory. Both parties are now obsessed with them.
To think this might’ve been our president. We had two divisive candidates face each other in the general.
I just love the shear unabashed neoliberalness of the "I won the places that represent 2/3rds of Americas GDP".
It's not a great statement, but it makes a point in terms that most conservatives would probably claim matters to them, given their love of throwing around terms like "personal responsibility," "hard work," and such. "Conservative" America is fundamentally failing to keep up with "Liberal" America economically as well as demographically. In every way that matters except majority control of large swathes of barely populated land, conservatives are becoming less and less relevant.
Well, I'm sure they're aware of that, too - Thus Trump and the dream of making America like it was when they were important and relevant.
And yes, I'm overgeneralizing. Whoops. When Trump apologizes for lumping the media into a basket labeled "Enemy of the American People," I'll apologize for lumping conservatives into a basket labeled "Increasingly Irrelevant."
The main reason it's funny is because she's not saying that we shouldn't do the bidding of corporate donors, but that Republicans are foolish for only pretending to do the bidding of successful corporations, when in reality the corporations they work for suck.
It is worth underlining, in a week dominated by reminders of the skulduggery that helped send Donald Trump to the White House a year ago, that the main reason for his victory was democratic. Mr Trump persuaded about 7m people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, most of them white, working-class and malcontent, to vote for him. Many had not voted Republican before.
Obama-Trump voters represented only about 4% of the electorate. But because they were concentrated in the swing states of the industrial north-east and mid-west, they outweighed Mrs Clinton’s more modest gains with groups such as the college-educated whites who migrated from the Republicans to the Democrats. They are the main reason Mr Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states that sealed his victory. Both parties are now obsessed with them.
Seems to make a lot more sense to just find ~4% of people that already mostly agree with you and just haven't/don't currently vote than trying to get people who empathize with neo-nazi's to vote for your side.
To think this might’ve been our president. We had two divisive candidates face each other in the general.
Clinton's basically just asking that the US becomes a representative democracy where the regions in which economic activity is concentrated gain proportional representation. If she'd not used the word "GDP" and had said "urban voter" I don't see what's wrong with the statement.
I can understand why this is upsetting if you can only win elections because affirmative action for the rural population is baked into the voting system
It is worth underlining, in a week dominated by reminders of the skulduggery that helped send Donald Trump to the White House a year ago, that the main reason for his victory was democratic. Mr Trump persuaded about 7m people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, most of them white, working-class and malcontent, to vote for him. Many had not voted Republican before.
Obama-Trump voters represented only about 4% of the electorate. But because they were concentrated in the swing states of the industrial north-east and mid-west, they outweighed Mrs Clinton’s more modest gains with groups such as the college-educated whites who migrated from the Republicans to the Democrats. They are the main reason Mr Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states that sealed his victory. Both parties are now obsessed with them.
Think it has to be that her beliefs are more talk rather than substance and that her core beliefs are just down to who can do more for her political motivations. See her response in the debate about her donors and Wall St. Her response, it's because she opened it back so quickly after 9/11. It was a family guy skit to the letter.
in other words she is just a Neoliberal hack, but since she is a woman she believes she should have gotten a pass.
On March 13 2018 19:32 A3th3r wrote: In Trump-related news, the president has kowtowed to the NRA on gun control and has made no major policy changes. Sad!
On March 13 2018 07:52 Simberto wrote: "I would argue raising standards and holding people back a few times would help."
I would like to mention that this is in no way supported by empirical evidence. Holding people back a grade actually reduces the amount of stuff they learn during their next year. Retention is roughly as bad as corporal punishment (very bad) at home with regards to its effect on learning, and way worse than for example television at home.
This is interesting to me. Do you happen to have sources I can read regarding the supposed detrimental effects that holding students back a grade has on their learning? I'm particularly interested in math education as an example, since I feel these negative effects are counterintuitive. Considering the years of math build on each other, I would think it's of the utmost importance for high school students to have a strong foundation in arithmetic and algebra before starting the higher maths, even if that means spending another year (or summer school) on algebra. Students who have weak algebra skills will struggle even more in trigonometry and calculus, for example. You think it would be worse for them to spend more time on algebra than to be pushed through to the next math? Even if they're failing?
As I read Simberto's comment, it seems fairly misleading. I think what he is saying is "if you have a first grader and make them repeat first grade, they will learn less in the following year if they repeat first grade vs. going to second grade." That seems obvious and kind of useless. Of course they will. If they learned 70% of the first grade material the first time they went through and got up to 90% the second time through, they only learned 20% of a year's worth the second time! That kid could have gone on to second grade and learned 50% of a new year's worth of stuff.
Of course that is the wrong comparison. What we care about is how that kid does in second grade after a repeat year vs. without.
I think if someone learned 70% of the material, having a system that can't get them the other 30% without repeating the 70% they already know is failing that student.
I think you are right that the statistic as presented is less substantial than implied but I don't think an excellent performance in 2nd grade would mean that holding the kid back was a great choice either.
That is how i meant it. And no, i dont think that that is the wrong comparison. The point of school is learning stuff. You automatically learn more stuff the more time you spend, so the only valid metric of good education is "stuff learned/time spent", not something totally arbitrary like "stuff learned/grade you are in". Otherwise, the optimal system would be to just have children repeat a grade over and over until they learn everything there is to learn in that grade. "Hey, our second graders know quantum mechanics, because they have been in second grade for 57 years!" obviously that is a reduction to the absurd, but it think it clarifies why i think that the valid timeline is the life of the student, not the position in the education system.
The goal should be to have the maximum learning effect in each year. And retention is really bad at that. But of course, putting children into progressively harder grades while they lack parts of the necessary background knowledge is also not optimal. It is just less bad than retention. A better system would find ways to allow for the students to fill up the holes in their knowledge instead of putting them into situations where they are basically forced to fail or situations where they are stuck repeating the same stuff that they already know most of the time.
On March 13 2018 07:52 Simberto wrote: "I would argue raising standards and holding people back a few times would help."
I would like to mention that this is in no way supported by empirical evidence. Holding people back a grade actually reduces the amount of stuff they learn during their next year. Retention is roughly as bad as corporal punishment (very bad) at home with regards to its effect on learning, and way worse than for example television at home.
This is interesting to me. Do you happen to have sources I can read regarding the supposed detrimental effects that holding students back a grade has on their learning? I'm particularly interested in math education as an example, since I feel these negative effects are counterintuitive. Considering the years of math build on each other, I would think it's of the utmost importance for high school students to have a strong foundation in arithmetic and algebra before starting the higher maths, even if that means spending another year (or summer school) on algebra. Students who have weak algebra skills will struggle even more in trigonometry and calculus, for example. You think it would be worse for them to spend more time on algebra than to be pushed through to the next math? Even if they're failing?
As I read Simberto's comment, it seems fairly misleading. I think what he is saying is "if you have a first grader and make them repeat first grade, they will learn less in the following year if they repeat first grade vs. going to second grade." That seems obvious and kind of useless. Of course they will. If they learned 70% of the first grade material the first time they went through and got up to 90% the second time through, they only learned 20% of a year's worth the second time! That kid could have gone on to second grade and learned 50% of a new year's worth of stuff.
Of course that is the wrong comparison. What we care about is how that kid does in second grade after a repeat year vs. without.
I think if someone learned 70% of the material, having a system that can't get them the other 30% without repeating the 70% they already know is failing that student.
I think you are right that the statistic as presented is less substantial than implied but I don't think an excellent performance in 2nd grade would mean that holding the kid back was a great choice either.
That is how i meant it. And no, i dont think that that is the wrong comparison. The point of school is learning stuff. You automatically learn more stuff the more time you spend, so the only valid metric of good education is "stuff learned/time spent", not something totally arbitrary like "stuff learned/grade you are in". Otherwise, the optimal system would be to just have children repeat a grade over and over until they learn everything there is to learn in that grade. "Hey, our second graders know quantum mechanics, because they have been in second grade for 57 years!" obviously that is a reduction to the absurd, but it think it clarifies why i think that the valid timeline is the life of the student, not the position in the education system.
The goal should be to have the maximum learning effect in each year. And retention is really bad at that. But of course, putting children into progressively harder grades while they lack parts of the necessary background knowledge is also not optimal. It is just less bad than retention. A better system would find ways to allow for the students to fill up the holes in their knowledge instead of putting them into situations where they are basically forced to fail or situations where they are stuck repeating the same stuff that they already know most of the time.
Your conclusions conflict with your reasoning, Simberto. If a student's educational timeline is more important and figurative than his or her position in the education system, then holding students back or otherwise stopping them from taking part in the routine step-based grade system shouldn't be as bad as you're suggesting. Further, you're making value judgments in terms of the adequacy of a student's knowledge as it matches up with the mechanics of failure and/or being held back a grade. For example, "repeating the same stuff" deserves a lot of qualification; are the students literally repeating the same material or is the teacher tailoring some of the repeat material? Further, say that the student did very poorly the prior year because their homelife fell apart and they literally paid almost no attention at school that whole time; does "repeating the same stuff" still ring as negatively then? I'd say no.
More generally, I think the point Sadist and others were getting at is that the US absolutely has a problem with the concept of failure as it relates to worth and place in society, and though holding students back a grade seems like strong medicine, allowing students to graduate from high school while barely being able to read, write, or do math is weak medicine by the same margin. Further, this stigma associated with poor academic performance spills over into our problem with vocations and trade skills, so in the sense that holding a student back makes less sense than sending them somewhere where their talents are better put to use, then I suppose I agree with your criticism.
On March 13 2018 07:52 Simberto wrote: "I would argue raising standards and holding people back a few times would help."
I would like to mention that this is in no way supported by empirical evidence. Holding people back a grade actually reduces the amount of stuff they learn during their next year. Retention is roughly as bad as corporal punishment (very bad) at home with regards to its effect on learning, and way worse than for example television at home.
This is interesting to me. Do you happen to have sources I can read regarding the supposed detrimental effects that holding students back a grade has on their learning? I'm particularly interested in math education as an example, since I feel these negative effects are counterintuitive. Considering the years of math build on each other, I would think it's of the utmost importance for high school students to have a strong foundation in arithmetic and algebra before starting the higher maths, even if that means spending another year (or summer school) on algebra. Students who have weak algebra skills will struggle even more in trigonometry and calculus, for example. You think it would be worse for them to spend more time on algebra than to be pushed through to the next math? Even if they're failing?
As I read Simberto's comment, it seems fairly misleading. I think what he is saying is "if you have a first grader and make them repeat first grade, they will learn less in the following year if they repeat first grade vs. going to second grade." That seems obvious and kind of useless. Of course they will. If they learned 70% of the first grade material the first time they went through and got up to 90% the second time through, they only learned 20% of a year's worth the second time! That kid could have gone on to second grade and learned 50% of a new year's worth of stuff.
Of course that is the wrong comparison. What we care about is how that kid does in second grade after a repeat year vs. without.
I think if someone learned 70% of the material, having a system that can't get them the other 30% without repeating the 70% they already know is failing that student.
I think you are right that the statistic as presented is less substantial than implied but I don't think an excellent performance in 2nd grade would mean that holding the kid back was a great choice either.
That is how i meant it. And no, i dont think that that is the wrong comparison. The point of school is learning stuff. You automatically learn more stuff the more time you spend, so the only valid metric of good education is "stuff learned/time spent", not something totally arbitrary like "stuff learned/grade you are in". Otherwise, the optimal system would be to just have children repeat a grade over and over until they learn everything there is to learn in that grade. "Hey, our second graders know quantum mechanics, because they have been in second grade for 57 years!" obviously that is a reduction to the absurd, but it think it clarifies why i think that the valid timeline is the life of the student, not the position in the education system.
The goal should be to have the maximum learning effect in each year. And retention is really bad at that. But of course, putting children into progressively harder grades while they lack parts of the necessary background knowledge is also not optimal. It is just less bad than retention. A better system would find ways to allow for the students to fill up the holes in their knowledge instead of putting them into situations where they are basically forced to fail or situations where they are stuck repeating the same stuff that they already know most of the time.
Your conclusions conflict with your reasoning, Simberto. If a student's educational timeline is more important and figurative than his or her position in the education system, then holding students back or otherwise stopping them from taking part in the routine step-based grade system shouldn't be as bad as you're suggesting. Further, you're making value judgments in terms of the adequacy of a student's knowledge as it matches up with the mechanics of failure and/or being held back a grade. For example, "repeating the same stuff" deserves a lot of qualification; are the students literally repeating the same material or is the teacher tailoring some of the repeat material? Further, say that the student did very poorly the prior year because their homelife fell apart and they literally paid almost no attention at school that whole time; does "repeating the same stuff" still ring as negatively then? I'd say no.
More generally, I think the point Sadist and others were getting at is that the US absolutely has a problem with the concept of failure as it relates to worth and place in society, and though holding students back a grade seems like strong medicine, allowing students to graduate from high school while barely being able to read, write, or do math is weak medicine by the same margin. Further, this stigma associated with poor academic performance spills over into our problem with vocations and trade skills, so in the sense that holding a student back makes less sense than sending them somewhere where their talents are better put to use, then I suppose I agree with your criticism.
But as the Hattie-metastudy shows, if you hold students back for a year, they learn less during the year they just repeated. That was my whole point. That seems like a bad system. And i agree that the standard stepladder is probably not the best system for enhancing students abilities. And i also agree that even within the stepladder system, you require a way to deal with students who fall further and further behind due to a lack of knowledge required to learn the current material spiral. Holding students back a year is just really bad at doing that and basically wastes a whole year of the students time for small gains.
Of the back of my head, all of the following sound instinctively better (though one would obviously have to test whether they actually work or not): additional schooling during the summer break, additional basic classes during the following year, differentiating the classes during the following year based on student ability.
The problem is that all of the above require effort and money (for additional teacher hours). Having the student repeat a year isn't as directly expensive (though if you actually calculate the cost of a complete additional years worth of teacher hours, that isn't neglectable either, it just seems like it is free because you can just sit the student into a class that is already there), and organisatorially easy.
I think this reliance on the findings of a single (albeit huge in scale and thorough) study presents interpretive problems and it would seem that I'm not alone. For example, a reviewer wrote the following:
This book by John Hattie – Professor of Education at the University of Auckland – is the culmination of more than a decade of research during which he and his team have set out to summarise and synthesise the empirical research on the effects of various educational influences and interventions on student achievement. Probably due to the huge scope of this project – comprising 800 meta-analyses, more than 50,000 smaller studies and more than 80 million pupils – this study has been widely acclaimed. According to a review in the Times Educational Supplement, Hattie’s work “reveals teaching’s Holy Grail”.
Hattie starts from the observation that in education “everything seems to work”, as educational interventions of almost any kind seem to have a positive effect on student achievement. He then proposes to move beyond “everything goes”, towards the development of a barometer of “what works best”. To this end he applies the tools of meta-analysis to a huge body of empirical research and calculates effect sizes (denoted d) for 138 influences in the following domains: student, home, school, teacher, curricula and teaching approaches. Hattie neatly presents the effect sizes in a graphical barometer and convincingly argues that only effect sizes higher than 0.4 are in the so-called zone of desired effects (in other words, are worth the effort). Prior to presenting the barometers and effect size rankings, Hattie develops his visible learning story, which is summarised in the following quote: “Visible teaching and learning occurs when learning is the explicit goal, when it is appropriately challenging, when the teacher and student both seek to ascertain whether and to what degree the challenging goal is attained, when there is deliberate practice aimed at attaining mastery of the goal, when there is feedback given and sought, and when there are active, passionate and engaging people participating in the act of learning” (p. 22). The visible learning story is illustrated using the example of outdoor training. An instructor teaching rock-climbing will have continuous visual feedback on the success of his teaching efforts (pupils climbing high or falling down) and be able to adjust his teaching accordingly.
I find the visible learning story a convincing story. I believe most teachers will agree with the book’s main message that effective instruction cannot take place without proper feedback from student to teacher on the effectiveness of the instruction. Hattie also convincingly argues that the effectiveness of teaching increases when teachers act as activator instead of as facilitator, a view which I find refreshing in a time when teaching approaches such as problem-based learning have the effect of sidelining the instructor. My problem with the book is, however, that I would have been convinced even without the empirical analysis. If anything, Hattie’s meta-meta-analysis casts a few doubts on the validity of his research, as I will explain below.
My first comment, however, relates to Hattie’s goal in writing this book. He states that his aim is “to develop an explanatory story about key influences on student learning”, not to build another “what works recipe”. Yet this aim fits uneasily with the barometers and rankings which are scattered across the book. By presenting these measures so prominently, the author automatically invites the reader to make a clear distinction between what works and what doesn’t work. If Hattie doesn’t want us to draw such conclusions, he should not have presented the material in this way. Related to this is the tension between story-telling and ranking influences. The visible learning story is told in Chapter 3 and naturally refers to some of the effect sizes calculated in the remainder of the book. Yet the relationship between story and effect sizes remains implicit and qualitative. The reader has no indication or test result of how well the effect sizes fit the visible learning story.
I next turn to the way in which the meta-meta-analysis has been conducted. Hattie discusses the various pros and cons of meta-analysis extensively and concludes that this is a valid research methodology. I will not take issue with this point, as meta-analysis is a generally accepted tool of academic research. As a general statistical point, however, I was surprised that Hattie has chosen to summarise the effect sizes of the 800 meta-analyses using unweighted averages. Small and large meta-analyses have equal weight, while I would assume that the number of studies on which a meta-analysis is based indicates its validity and importance. Instead I would have opted for weighted averaging by number of studies, students or effect sizes. At a minimum, it would be interesting to see whether the results are robust to the choice of averaging.
A great asset of Hattie’s book is the reference list, which allows the inquisitive reader to dig a little bit deeper, by moving from the rankings to the underlying meta-studies. I have done this for the top-ranking influence, which is “self-reported grades” (d = 1.44). This result is dominated by the Kuncel et al. (2005) meta-analysis (d = 3.1) (Kuncel et al. 2005). This paper is about the validity of ex-post self-reported grades (due to imperfect storage and retrieval from memory or intentional deception), not about students’ expectations or their predictive power of their own study performance, as Hattie claims. The paper thus should not have been included in the analysis. My N = 1 sampling obviously has its limits, but this example does raise questions regarding the remaining average effect sizes.
Two final comments relate to the application of Hattie’s work. While it is certainly valuable to know “what works best” in education, educational institutions will need to know not just the benefit of educational interventions, but also their cost. So the question which really needs to be answered is “what works best per monetary unit spent”. On the cost side, however, Hattie’s book is silent. Also, given the importance of two-way feedback in teaching, a major challenge for large-scale educational institutions (such as universities) is to organise feedback in a cost-effective manner.
Visible learning should be lauded for emphasising the importance of the student–teacher relationship and of adequate feedback, but at the same time presents managers with the challenge of organising this feedback in large scale educational settings.
EPT
