John Hattie’s Top Ten Visible Learning Takeaways –
Number Eight:
Comprehensive Interventions for Learning Disabled Students
This is the third of a ten part series that serves to highlight the most significant findings and their applications to our classrooms from Hattie’s 2012 work, Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning.
Number 8 – Comprehensive Interventions for Learning Disabled Students
Hattie cited a wide range of studies and types of successful interventions in this vastly studied area of education. He cited Swanson et al.’s 1999 work which found that a combination of direct instruction and strategy instruction was highly effective.The important components of instruction included “attention to sequencing, drill-repetition-practice, segmenting information into parts or units for later synthesis, controlling task difficulty through prompts and cues, making use of technology, systematically modeling problem solving steps, and making use of small interactive groups” (p. 217). One common theme that held true throughout the studies was the importance of direct instruction.
Application to the Classroom
If you are looking for the best research-based interventions look no further than the United States Department of Education What Works Clearinghouse website (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/). You are able to filter your desired instructional need by topic and grade level and are given a list of interventions with their respective improvement index, effectiveness rating, and extent of evidence related to the intervention. There are a plethora of researched interventions that can help to guide educators to best meet students’ needs. The website has a specific tab for children and students with disabilities.
Hattie, J., Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (2009)
Hattie, J. Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning (2012)
Shute, V.J., Focus on Formative Feedback (2008)
Effect size image retrieved from: http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/what_works.htm
Maxwell image retrieved from http://quotesgram.com/care-john-c-maxwell-quotes/#9PWYZjgpMN
