Yacapaca

John Hattie is the educational guru du jour, and with good reason. He has the research on his side. If you have not seen his graded list of 138 Influences on Student Achievement, the whole thing is here. Expect to find his Visible Learning on your CPD menu for the coming year.

I want to focus on just the top three.

I will be the first to admit that Piaget and Yacapaca don’t really have a lot to say to each other, but let’s look at the other two.

Self-reported grades

Hattie says…

Self reported grades comes out at the top of all influences. Children are the most accurate when predicting how they will perform…. Once a student has performed at a level that is beyond their own expectations, he or she gains confidence in his or her learning ability.

…and here is how Yacapaca implements it

At the start of each quiz, we ask students to predict their scores. After the quiz is over, we reward them with badge points, not for a high or a low score, but for the accuracy of their predictions. In this way we encourage students to really own a realistic expectation of their own ability, on which they can then build. We call it ‘self-calibration’ and you can read a fuller description here.

Providing formative evaluation

Hattie says…

…formative evaluation refers to any activity used as an assessment of learning progress before or during the learning process itself.

[I’m not quite sure why he does not call it formative assessment, the word he uses in his glossary]

…and here is how Yacapaca implements it

After each question, students are shown several feedback statements and asked to vote for the best one. Voting achieves two things: it actively engages the student in evaluating the feedback statement itself, and it helps us eliminate weak feedback statements and present more useful ones. The statements themselves are written by students, and moderated before being presented for voting. More background here, and how to view your students’ statements here.

Conclusion

Hattie lists 42 interventions with an effect size greater than 0.5. Yacapaca can fairly claim to make a significant contribution to 11 of them. For most of these, and certainly the top two, these are built-in features of Yacapaca. There is nothing additional you need to do, other than brag that you have been there all along when the subject of Hattie inevitably comes up in conversation.