Professor John Hattie

Professor John Hattie's main area of research and scholarship is self-concept, educational measurement, and the application of measurement models to education practice. Email: j.hattie@auckland.ac.nz Teachers Make a Difference: What is the research evidence? Australian Council for Educational Research Annual Conference on: Building Teacher Quality John Hattie1 University of Auckland October 2003 Identifying that what matters,"Teachers make a difference:" Students which account for about 50% of the variance of achievement. It is what students brings to the table that predicts achievement more than any other variable. The correlation between ability and achievement is high, so it is no surprise that bright students have steeper trajectories of learning than their less bright students. Our role in schools is to improve the trajectory of all these students, and I note the recent PIRLS and TIMMS studies which have shown that our trajectory for the not so bright students is one of the flattest in the OECD worlds. Home which accounts for about 5-10% of the variance – considering that the major effects of the home are already accounted for by the attributes of the student. The home effects are more related to the levels of expectation and encouragement, and certainly not a function of the involvement of the parents or caregivers in the management of schools. Schools which account for about 5-10% of the variance. Schools barely make a difference to achievement. The discussion on the attributes of schools – the finances, the school size, the class size, the buildings are important as they must be there in some form for a school to exist, but that is about it. Given NZ schools are well resourced with more uniformity in the minimum standards than most countries, it should be less surprising that in NZ the school effects are probably even lower than in other countries. Principals are already accounted for in the variance attributed to schools and mainly, I would argue, because of their influence on the climate of the school. Principals who create a school with high student responsiveness rather than bureaucratic control (i.e., more like a primary school atmosphere than an Intermediate and unlike so many NZ secondary schools), who create a climate of psychological safety to learn, who create a focus of discussion on student learning have the influence. The effect on learning is trickled through these attributes rather than directly on learning. Peer effects which accounts for about 5-10% of the variance. It does not matter too much who you go to school with, and when students are taken from one school and put in another the influence of peers is minimal (of course, there are exceptions, but they do not make the norm). My colleagues, lead by Ian Wilkinson, completed a major study on peer influences and perhaps we are more surprised by the under utilisation of peers as co-teachers in classrooms, and the dominance of the adult in the room to the diminution of the power of the peer. Certainly peers can have a positive effect on learning, but the discussion is too quickly moving to the negative powers with the recent increase in discussion on bullying (which is too real), and on the manner students create reputations around almost anything other than pride in learning. Teachers who account for about 30% of the variance. It is what teachers know, do, and care about which is very powerful in this learning equation.