DEPUTY'S DESK

LEARNING AND TEACHING REPORT

St Joseph’s College, Mildura provides an abundance of opportunities and support to enable students to achieve at the best possible level.  Students at St Joseph’s College, want for little in terms of their academic development.

However, I sometimes have conversations with students who want to have a change of environment and sometimes they have thought hard and long about this and often from their perspective they can see only advantages in moving. But, I wonder if they know that there are generally also negative effects of moving schools.

I was lucky enough to attend a conference last week where one of the keynote speakers was John Hattie. Professor John Hattie has been big in education circles for the last 10 years as a result of his meta-analysis of research in to what works in education – effectively what improves learning and what is detrimental to learning.

John Hattie became known to a wider public with his two books Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers. Visible Learning is a synthesis of more than 800 meta-studies covering more than 80 million students. According to John Hattie Visible Learning is the result of 15 years of research about what works best for learning in schools. At times John Hattie has been called “possibly the world’s most influential education academic”.

John Hattie talks about factors that affect learning and he uses a formula to assign “effect size” to the various factors. When he talks about “effect size” he contends that at a basic level of understanding an effect size of 0.5 represents an increase in achievement of one grade higher than average expected achievement and an effect size of 1.0 would be an increase in two grades.

Of the 256 factors that John Hattie’s research considered, “Moving Schools” came in as having a negative effect -0.34. That is, it actually has an effect of lowering achievement below average expected achievement. On average, according to John Hattie’s meta-analysis, students generally will effectively go backwards in their learning and achievement when moving schools.

When you think about this, it is not totally surprising. Valuable time and effort is required to become familiar, comfortable and to gain an understanding of the new learning environment – this is time that could be better spent undertaking academic pursuits. Teachers at the new school will not be as familiar with the student, so may not have an understanding of what works for individual students. Also, there is no transfer of information about a student’s learning style, strengths and weaknesses to the teachers at the new school. If they stay at their current school this information is readily available.

In terms of academic development and learning the John Hattie research clearly shows that moving schools generally has a negative impact on a student’s learning, something to be kept in mind.

Mr Greg Kluske

Deputy Principal, Learning and Teaching