Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 68.  Today we are talking about What Works Best.

We all know that we can pretty much find research to support any claim you ever want to make about what works when teaching.  There’s research to say ability grouping works, there’s research to say it doesn’t.  There’s research to say we should use manipulatives, there’s research to say we shouldn’t.

But when I hear that something has an effect-size of _____, it makes me give more pause to consider something.

If you aren’t familiar with effect-sizes, they come from the work of John Hattie that was published in the book Visible Thinking. I’ll link to it over on buildmathminds.com/68 so you can dig into it more.  But, to summarize, Hattie did a meta-analysis and combined findings from 80,000 studies to find patterns to help us inform our practice.  The effect size is the size of the effect certain things have on student learning.