2024/05/30 by Stephen Vainker · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · #Ethics in Business and Education
paper · pdf · doi:10.31235/osf.io/rzjc9
openalex publication_date 2024/05/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
This article sets out John Hattie’s extensive and discrediting failures to uphold academic standards in relation to the development of his Visible Learning model of teaching and learning. The failures relate to his use of Edwin Locke’s business-orientated goal-setting theory as the basis for the model. Locke developed goal-setting theory for the purpose of improving employee performance in work tasks, under the influence of the foundational figure of scientific management, Frederick Taylor, and the hyper-libertarian thinker Ayn Rand. Hattie has developed his model of teaching and learning through routinely taking direct quotations from Locke and other goal-setting theorists, often amending them slightly to remove workplace connotations and/or adding educational connotations, and inserting them into his work with only insufficient, indirect citations. Hattie has also taken tables of goal-setting data and reproduced them without citation, in the process introducing errors and misunderstandings. It is argued that Hattie’s failures relate to an irresolvable problem of the reform movement: that it was constructed through joining together the educational with the corporate, an essentially incoherent and politically unsustainable combination. A methodological approach for targeting and pressing on this problem as the basis for more politically persuasive critique of the reform movement is offered.