John Hattie and the magical power of prediction
"Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous." Hyman G. Rickover — Speech to US Naval Post Graduate School, March 16, 1954 In this post I picked up on a rather odd comment made by Professor Hattie at a recent conference: ...tests don’t tell kids about how much they’ve learnt. Kids are very, very good at predicting how well they’ll do in a test.” Are they? In my response I argued that he's wrong: Most students are novices – they don’t yet know much about the subject they’re studying. Not only do they not know much, they’re unlikely to know the value of what they do know [...]