What works BEST in education?

The main task of any teacher is to promote and maximize the learning of all students. This hard issue is rarely achieved, so there are many students who are driven to school failure, either by early school leaving or by not getting an official title. Researchers and teachers continuously try to identify those variables, techniques or methodologies that best contribute to learning, struggling with results that are sometimes not generalizable.

In 2009, the Australian researcher John Hattie published the results of more than 15 years of work in the book “Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyzes Relating to Achievement”. In this book, Hattie studied the results of 800 meta-analyzes that brought together 50,000 studies that aimed to improve student learning outcomes. The main idea of the author is that is probable that any teaching intervention results in student’s learning, however there may be some interventions which works better than others and with which students learns more. Hattie’s purpose was to calculate the effect size of different types of educational interventions, establishing a kind of “ranking” of effectiveness.

The results of his work are available in many web pages, like Visible Learning Plus o Visible Learning, as well as in the referred book.