Professor John Hattie is a known researcher of academic achievement in kids. It is common to test academic material under laboratory conditions, which means that the people being tested are under the guidance of researchers instead of regular teachers. The group being tested differs from a control group which is used as a benchmark. A John Hattie Effect Size is an indication of how great a difference there is between the control group and the test group.
A single unit in John Hattie’s system is the equivalent of increasing performance by two grade levels or 20 to 30 percent on a percentage scale. It is like going from a C to an A or from a D to a B. This is a very large gap but is standard according to his grading scale. On this scale, different factors are grades. As an example, being under peer stress can affect performance by a negative 0.19.
Differences that positively influence grades include homework and making the subject more interesting by providing games and examples that are entertaining. If the students perceive the subjects as important, then they also tend to remember more information and score several percentage points better than the control group.
Two factors with the highest effect on grades are teacher subjectivity and student subjectivity when they are allowed to give themselves a grade. In these cases, the difference was greater than 1.0. Other effects that made a great difference are student IQ as well as prior student exposure to a subject.
The John Hattie Effect Size is a term associated with his grading scale and largely just confirms the unscientific observation that a lot of different influences have an impact on grades. Students ought to study repeatedly prior to a test and then should take a final refresher before the test in order to take advantage of both longterm and short term memory.
Researchers are interested in changes in grades in groups because it means that circumstances and teaching methods do make a huge difference in learning and the difference is not entirely personal. The larger the sample size, the clearer that circumstances create the change. As an example, people in some neighborhoods might be under greater stress than other students.
There is hope that teaching methods can improve learning. As a general rule, students have to have the desire to learn a subject. Positive attention and reinforcement also help to achieve better grades because positivity encourages behavior.
