John Hattie’s Top Ten Visible Learning Takeaways –
Number Five: Formative Assessment
Formative assessment is one of the cornerstones of Hattie’s visible learning premise. The power of immediate feedback to impact student achievement has few equals in regards to effect size. He asserts that it is important for teachers “to pay attention to the formative effects of their teaching, as it is these attributes of seeking formative evaluation of the effects (intended and unintended) of their programs that makes for excellence in teaching” (2009, p. 181).
Hattie found that when teachers use data and evidence-based models the effect size was higher than when teacher judgment was used. Furthermore, when the formative data was graphed the effect size was higher than when it was only recorded.
Application to the Classroom
If you are an educator that is fortunate enough to have a 1:1 instructional environment, or at least easy access to classroom technology, there are a multitude of online formative assessment tools that can redefine your formative evaluation methods and feedback effectiveness.
Hubpages.com lists some of the top tools out there (Socrative, Formative, Kahoot!, Google Forms, and Quizzizz) which provide the opportunity for efficient and focused feedback to inform both the teacher and the student how they are progressing. Most of these tools and many others provide easy to use graphs, charts, and spreadsheets to capture the feedback in the most user-friendly ways.
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
