John Hattie admits that half of the Statistics in Visible Learning are wrong

At the researchED conference in September 2013, Professor Robert Coe, Professor of Education at Durham University, said that John Hattie’s book, ‘Visible Learning’,  is “riddled with errors”. But what are some of those errors?

The biggest mistake Hattie makes is with the CLE statistic that he uses throughout the book. In ‘Visible Learning, Hattie only uses two statistics, the ‘Effect Size’ and the CLE (neither of which Mathematicians use).

The CLE is meant to be a probability, yet Hattie has it at values between -49% and 219%. Now a probability can’t be negative or more than 100% as any Year 7 will tell you.

This was first spotted and pointed out to him by Arne Kare Topphol, an Associate Professor at the University of Volda and his class who sent Hattie an email.

In his first reply –  here , Hattie completely misses the point about probability being negative and claims he actually used a different version of the CLE than the one he actually referenced (by McGraw and Wong). This makes his academic referencing, hmm, the word I’m going to use here is ‘interesting’.

In his second reply –  here , Hattie reluctantly acknowledges that the CLE has in fact been calculated incorrectly throughout the book but brushes it off as no big deal that out of two statistics in the book he has calculated one incorrectly.

There are several worrying aspects to this –

Firstly, it took 3 years for the mistake to be noticed, and it’s not as though it’s a subtle statistical error that only a Mathematician would spot, he has probability as negative for goodness sake. Presumably, the entire Educational Research community read the book when it came out and they all completely missed it. So, the question must be asked, who is checking John Hattie’s work? As a Bachelor of Arts is he capable of spotting Mathematical errors himself?

In Mathematics, new or unproven work is handed over to unbiased judges who go through it with a fine toothcomb before it is considered to have the stamp of approval of the Mathematical community. Who is performing this function for the Educational community?

Secondly, despite the fact that John Hattie has presumably known about this error since last year there has been no publicity telling people that part of the book is wrong and should not be used. Surely he could have found time between flying round the world to his many Visible Learning conferences to squeeze in a quick announcement.

As one of the letter writer’s stepfather, a Professor of Statistics said

“People who don’t know that Probability can’t be negative, shouldn’t write books on Statistics”

Sources –

Book review – Visible Learning by @twistedsq

Can we trust educational research? – (“Visible Learning”: Problems with the evidence)

EDIT – Since this post we have also discovered why the CLEs are all wrong and the reason is shocking. Read about it here – John Hattie admits that half of the Statistics in Visible Learning are wrong (Part 2).