I can't remember which of my Facebook friends the other day recommended this article, but I'm glad I read it. I read John Hattie's book Visible Learning a few y

I can't remember which of my Facebook friends the other day recommended this article, but I'm glad I read it. I read John Hattie's book Visible Learning a few years ago on the recommendation of a school board candidate (who succeeded in getting elected) in my local public school district. As an observer of my children's learning in the local public high school (I have mostly been a homeschooler, but my second son and third son have recently been enrolled in the local high school), I see that "formative assessment" (testing learners on material they are only beginning to learn does indeed seem to be a very helpful way to prompt learners to learn more. I expect to do a lot of formative assessment for the new students I will have the week after next at a school where I am about to begin classroom teaching of middle school mathematics during the regular school day. I have read another book by Hattie, co-authored with Richard Fletcher, called Intelligence and Intelligence Testing, which is also quite good. Those of you who find this article intriguing and would like to learn more about ideas that work in education are likely to enjoy reading the longer linked paper by John Hattie, "What Doesn't Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction,"[1] which provides more details on the ideas he thinks work and what other ideas don't work and why. [1] https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html