Visible Learning: The Sequel: A Synthesis of Over 2,100 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement

by John Hattie

When the original Visible Learning® was published in 2008, it instantly became a publishing sensation. Interest in the book was unparalleled; it sold out in days and was described by the TES as revealing "teaching’s Holy Grail". Now John Hattie returns to this ground-breaking work. The research underlying this book is now informed by more than 2,100 meta-analyses (more than double that of the original), drawn from more than 130,000 studies, and has involved more than 400 million students from all around the world.

But this is more than just a new edition. This book is a sequel that highlights the major story, taking in the big picture to reflect on the implementation in schools of Visible Learning, how it has been understood – and at times misunderstood – and what future directions research should take.

Visible The Sequel reiterates the author’s desire to move beyond claiming what works to what works best by asking crucial questions such Why is the current grammar of schooling so embedded in so many classrooms, and can we improve it? Why is the learning curve for teachers after the first few years so flat? How can we develop teacher mind-frames to focus more on learning and listening? How can we incorporate research evidence as part of the discussions within schools?

Areas covered

The evidence base and reactions to Visible Learning The Visible Learning model The intentional alignment of learning and teaching strategies The influence of home, students, teachers, classrooms, schools, learning, and curriculum on achievement The impact of technology Building upon the success of the original, this highly anticipated sequel expands Hattie’s model of teaching and learning based on evidence of impact and is essential reading for anyone involved in the field of education either as a researcher, teacher, student, school leader, teacher trainer, or policy maker.

Genres: Education, Teaching, Nonfiction

509 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 20, 2023

About the author

John Allan Clinton Hattie ONZM (born 1950) was born in Timaru, New Zealand, and has been a professor of education and director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, since March 2011. He was previously professor of education at the University of Auckland.

Source: Wikipedia

Reviews

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book and Hattie’s ideas suffer from the flaws of meta analysis, that the information and arguments fall apart the more you look into them. You can pick nearly any conclusion of his from the book and find well reasoned arguments on the flaws of the data he is using. It is not that I disagree with most of his conclusions, but I think one would be better served just by going to Marzano’s work.

(Non-fiction book 8 for the year.)

[Robbie Burns]

To be reviewed for Schools Week.

Worth the time and energy of every teacher, school leader or stakeholder in education. Regardless of the opinions you may or may not have of the ‘big data’ he describes here, to ignore it in our pursuit of a thoroughly research-informed profession would be utterly foolish.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the read if you’re interested in this sort of thing! Could easily be read in pieces and as you need or want information rather than in one sitting.

[Rachel Bodner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 3 stars is very generous. Though there’s valuable information here, it’s repetitive, while also maintaining vagaries that make the meanings of WHAT is being reported unclear. Additionally, the book needs extensive editing. After deleting all the nearly word-for-word repetitive sections, and making basic corrections of errors that make the published text appear to be a very early draft, there are an unreasonable number of incomprehensible sections. I don’t mean because of content. I mean because of some seriously wild syntax:

P 60 “A central claim in the intent to teach notion presupposes that teachers make predictions or estimates of the future about what the teacher expects the actions that leads to the success criteria for all the students.”
N/V agreement?
Maybe some hyphenation to chunk the words in the beginning line?
Some internal punctuation?
WHAT is happening??!!

P 74. Here comes the opposite problem:
“Accountability models of trust but verify can have positive impacts.”
This is the lead, or maybe topic(?) sentence at the start of a paragraph. Except it’s not a sentence. Your guess is as good as mine…

P 176 back to the lengthy syntax train wreck:
“At the college level, *Credé and Niehorster (2012) showed that the greatest impact on students’ GPA (i.e., the degree to which students have adapted to the academic demands reflected in their attitudes toward their course), their engagement with material, and the adequacy of their student efforts (r= 0.39), then institutional attachment - the degree to which students identify with and become emotionally attached to the educational community (r= 0.19)”
Seriously. That’s the end.
This, again, was the first ‘sentence’ of a paragraph.

I have more. But I’m finding this tiresome.

Readers, grad students, IT IS NOT YOU! Do NOT believe that someone else’s expertise is so much greater than yours that it causes difficulties in understanding. This book is like lexical confetti.


PS- I wish my 6th grade teacher could check this out. It would be like an Olympic event to watch these sentences get diagrammed. I for sure can’t do it!!

[Abby Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

*note: this was for a condensed grad school class so it was already a struggle before I even started reading.
This was a VERY dense read, very. I didn’t like how the author referenced volume 1 of this book so often. This is a new book, Hattie! New information! He also talked about himself and his studies like he was always correct, which I didn’t love. Format-wise, there were tons of very long sentences, some with as many as 6-8 examples of what his point is. This made it very frustrating and hard to read. The information and data itself was interesting, though I really wish there were more studies on students with exceptionalities and there were some studies that just didn’t make sense (teachers refer less attractive students for special ed???) I had more of an issue the formatting and minor details than with the data itself. I might have a different perspective if I didn’t have to stress-read it in less than a month. Overall, good information and data (most of the time!)

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The meta-message here is great: we should do more of what measurably works best for student achievement. A quick-reference guide to the evidence in many facets of education is a tempting shortcut, but the devil is in the details.

Nerd addendum:
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. If all of this advice could be shown to improve achievement outcomes, that would be solid. The author claims that VL has been evaluated at scale and cites something called "Visible learning +: A decade of impact." Hooray! However, when I went to the website, that report was not there. If you click on the one box that sounds like that title, you get "the page cannot be found..." A word search of the website yielded nothing. Perhaps someone can tell me where this evaluation is. For now, this situation smells fishy to me.

The author acknowledges numerous problems with meta-analysis up front and that's good. But simply acknowledging a problem does not deal with it. The big issue with meta-analysis is GIGO. That weakness is only multiplied by doing meta-analyses of meta-analyses. If you start out with crappy studies, putting them together with each other in bigger and bigger piles just gives you a giant pile of crap.

Where I know something about the original studies, the topic summaries here seem accurate, so I am inclined to believe the methodology has some merit even if I would be more comfortable with a series of narrower best-evidence syntheses.

Pivotal Research in Early Literacy: Foundational Studies and Current Practices

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visible Learning is highly academic in nature, probing general trends in education research and weighting the impacts accordingly. While some faults may exist here due to how data from different populations are collected, this book does provide a general standpoint for understanding certain practices before looking into more specific data to uplift individual practice.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great resource for much of the work I do.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually not that bad a read. Gives further evidence in many areas to his previous books and provides some practical insights to what we are seeing in the classroom on a daily basis.

[Andreas Palmblad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great sequel! Both advanced and easy to grasp. Many thing confirmed and some beliefs challenged.