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Five-stringed criticism of John Hattie’s theory of Visible Learning…
Five-stringed criticism of John Hattie’s theory of Visible Learning
Hattie’s theory is an example of what happens when a theory of evaluation marginalizes, forgets,
and even destroys educational theory and practice.
VL is not a learning theory in its own right, and in fact it is not a pedagogical theory at all.
VL is what happens when education and learning are subjected to a rather simplistic theory of evaluation.
VL calls for an evaluative teacher who forces learners to set themselves through clear and measurable goals, goals that the learner will need to assess, evaluate and monitor in a maximizing and spiraling effect.
No systematic references to theories of education or didactics
A kind of motto, ‘Know thy impact’, interpreted as a goal-driven and largely statistically process: that is, as evaluation theory.
The educational object has disappeared: it is transformed into sheer evaluation.
‘teaching’ in an almost naive way is conceptualised as ‘an intervention’ addressing an isolated object of ‘achievement’
Evaluation theory has swallowed the very thing that it should evaluate. It then spits the remaining residues out as a poorly reflected logic of evaluation, a statistically and causally constructed system that is unable to see what it was supposed to evaluate.
There are major problems concerning the validity of the dependent variable: learning/achievement/learning outcome.
Even if we accept the idea of ‘learning’ as an evaluational effect, Hattie does not make a sufficiently precise definition of his dependent variable, that is, his effect variable: ‘achievement outcome/learning outcomes/learning’.
No one knows, as far as I can see, how the dependent variable ‘learning achievement’ is operationalised, or whether it is surface learning, deep learning or constructed learning.
We are simply told too little about the difference between surface understanding, deep understanding and the constructed understanding.
In a synthesis of a meta-analysis of 60,000 evaluational findings, one must assume that there are many different operationalisations going on, but nobody knows, and therefore there is from the point of view of educational research no systematic relationship between theory and empirical data.
The theory of evaluation reduces the concept of learning, while science expands it.
A ‘research cage’: that is, a system with high reliability and internal consistency but devoid of any contact with the object as such because the terms are mutually and reciprocally defined by each other
Hattie’s theory is a double attack on the concept of teaching and on the European cultural
tradition.
The dissolution of the teacher and the reconstruction of the teacher on the premise of dissolution
This is an example of classic constructivist anti-school thinking, in which interactions between teacher and culture (‘knowledge and ideas’) are reduced to student ‘construction’. Hattie also disregards what he calls ‘didactics’ (Hattie, 2009, p. 25).
This drilling into the student’s eye and mind, into his ‘visibility’, is in contrast to the classical constructivist teacher, who was a designer of learning so that the student could see and act for himself. Normally, the constructivist teacher is more or less absent from the learning process.
A radical constructivist theory is evident in three ways (1). the outside world is completely taken out of Hattie’s universe (references to social, scientific, political or economic aspects of educational life); (2). constructivism appears in a mutual reinforcement between two philosophical movements; (3). more traditional pedagogy, if mentioned at all, is put into the very simple and square categories.
The break from Western tradition
This disregard for ‘passivity’ is a philosophical deficiency.
Biesta writes that learning is to give yourself to teaching, so that you are ‘being taught’.
Dewey says that experience has two interacting aspects, namely a passive and an active part. The passive side of the experience is what Dewey calls ‘imagination’, which is to open experience to the transactions of the outside world, ‘the environment’. The external environment is completely absent from Hattie’s paradigm of learning, because all his basic theories are permeated by solipsism. And if there is no outside world, imagination is unable to operate.
Hattie’s concept of feedback has a built-in centralising effect.
Feedback in VL it is more about making learning visible to the teacher.
This shift has a powerful centralising effect - from student to teacher, from teacher to principal, from principal to central controller
Hattie radicalises an already reductionist reading of Karl Popper’s ‘three worlds’ theory.
Hattie builds his argument on an aspect of Popper’s philosophy. World 1: The physical world World 2: The subjective world World 3: Cultural and scientific objects/theories
Hattie relates World 1 to his concept of surface learning, World 2 to deep learning, and World 3, with a further reference to Carl Bereiter’s work, to the knowledge society’s demands for conceptual construction. According to Hattie, his educational project—the ‘self-monitoring learner’— takes place on the level of World 3.
World 3 is the world of cultural and scientific objects that have nothing to do with learning, because learning, and solipsist learning in particular, is a property of World 2.
Popper’s World 3 is a world of objectivity...abstract objects such as great books or great theories or great symphonies’, and he emphasies that these objects are ‘objectively great’
Hattie’s world is a world of cognition: in other words, World 2.
Popper–Bereiter–Hattie - reduction of Popper's ideas
There are no references to teaching content or to cultural and scientific matters, only to ‘achievements’ that are always conceptualised as cognitive processes in evaluational systems: that is, World 2.
Rømer, T.A. (2019). A critique of John Hattie’s theory of Visible Learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(6), 587-598, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1488216