John Hattie's research is deeply flawed

As we approach the end of another year, I wanted to discuss one of the flavors of the month in education that drives me absolutely insane. Our district leadership has been pushing the research of John Hattie on us as staff and when they went through the numbers I knew this research was deeply flawed. Seeing Socioeconomics and positive home environment in the bottom half did not pass my BS detector so I decided to look into how he came to his conclusions. Well as expected, not only were the sample sizes wholly inadequate, they were hand selected from innumerable studies completely unrelated to his. In the most basic terms, he had a conclusion he wanted to reach and cherry picked data from other research to support his assumptions. Anyone who has done serious research understands that this practice is unfortunately all too common and why we do blind peer reviews... which shocker of shocks, he did not do. Why does this matter? Because of the downstream effects it has on expectations of teachers to be miracle workers on miniscule salaries. Research like Hattie's is used by school leadership to gaslight teachers and it needs to be called out, otherwise we will continue to be held to unrealistic standards. We can believe in our students' ability to succeed while also understanding that some schools have more barriers to success than others. It's not one or the other as Hattie would lead us to believe. No matter how much I believe in my students ability to succeed, the average student in my poor community is not going to score the same as the average kid from the rich community. That's not a lack of efficacy, that's setting realistic expectations that can actually be realized. We absolutely should do what we can to help all of our students be the best they can be, but lying with numbers pulled out of thin air, then blaming teachers for not reaching unrealistic goals is not the answer. submitted by /u/B4B4BlueJ4y [link] [comments]