Last year a book by Professor John Hattie from the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland gained considerable attention in the media. The book was called ‘Visible Learning’. It detailed the results of a meta-analysis of research on what factors most positively influence
student learning as well identifying factors which had a negative effect.
 
One of the findings reported, that caused some controversy, was that class size didn’t matter. This seemed to fly in the face of common wisdom and indeed common sense. Actually Prof Hattie’s research showed that class size does matter, smaller classes do have a positive effect on student learning but compared to other factors it is quite a small effect – in fact out of 138 influences on student learning identified in his analysis, class size ranks 106th.
 
So, what are the most important influences? The top two are; students’ estimates of their own performance (“Student Self Reporting”) and teachers matching instructional materials and tasks to students’ stages of development (“Piagetian Programmes”)
 
So what do these mean in practice? It is apparent that students have a reasonably accurate understanding of their levels of achievement, especially by the time they are in High School. They are quite knowledgeable about their chances of success. The implications for teachers would seem to be that we need to access this knowledge through student self evaluation and conferencing, ensure they have appropriately challenging learning goals and to ensure that expectations for success are not less than what students know they can achieve.