Professor John Hattie

Professor John Hattie is a researcher in education. His research interests include performance indicators, models of measurement and evaluation of teaching and learning. John Hattie became known to a wider public with his two books Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers. Visible Learning is a synthesis of more than 1,850 meta-studies of over 108,000 studies involving more than 300 million students. Through the Visible Learning^TM research, John Hattie has identified 320 factors that influence student achievement. He then set about calculating a score or “effect size” for each, according to its bearing on student achievement. The average effect size of these 320 factors was 0.4, a marker that can be shown to represents an (average) year’s growth per year of schooling for a student. Any factor that has an effect size above 0.4 has an even greater positive effect on student learning. According to John Hattie Visible Learning is the result of nearly 30 years of research about what works best for learning in schools. TES once called him “possibly the world’s most influential education academic”.

John Hattie has been Director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, since March 2011. Before, he was Project Director of asTTle and Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada.