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High Impact Teacher Practices

Graham Nuthall was a New Zealand academic, researcher, and author who spent the vast majority of his working life exploring how students learn.

High Impact Teacher Practices

Multiple Exposures

​(0.71 Hattie 2009; 0.60 Spaced and Mass Practice Hattie 2018)

Graham Nuthall was a New Zealand academic, researcher, and author who spent the vast majority of his working life exploring how students learn.

His research was based primarily on observing teachers and students in classroom situations followed up with interviews afterwards and returning to re-assess a year later. Based on thousands of hours of observations and recordings, Nuthall formed controversial ideas that were at odds with established thinking at the time. Prior to his death much of his thinking was published in The Hidden Lives of Learners.

Nuthall and his team of researchers were able to successfully predict if learning would occur 88% of the time. They also successfully predicted if students would not learn and remember 85% of the time. He discovered that success and failure rates for learning were strongly related to the types of information ākonga encountered and the number of times they encountered it.

He classified 7 types of information in the following way:

Category A Information

This consists of a full set of information students need to understand and learn about a concept. It is information that is exact and consists of what it is students need to see, read, discuss, to hear – to engage with – including any prior knowledge students may possess…

… to see more visit SLEUTH™ Field 6, Section 14.

Visit SLEUTH™ to read more on how High Impact Teacher Practices can help grow your pedagogy and your learners outcomes.


SLEUTH™ ‘Quick Solutions’

The Planning Stage – Sequencing

To support knowledge acquisition, deep learning, and transfer of knowledge, deliberately sequence and time the exposures into unit plans and lessons so that learners will make connections and will store information in long-term memory.

The Planning Stage – Time

Because deep and transfer learning develop over time, ākonga will need time to take what they have seen & heard to use it themselves. Factor spaced interactions into your planning, whether in a single lesson, a day, several days, or over a protracted unit. By definition, the multiple exposures strategy succeeds only as well as you manage timed exposures.

The Deployment Stage – The ratio of full information to partial

Each time you teach an important concept, ensure students interact with it at intervals in one of the following combinations, where A represents a full set of information, and B represents a partial set of information including processing of it.

A + A + A + A

A + A + A + B

A + A + B + B + B

A + B + B + B + B

The Deployment Stage – Cognitive load

When using a multiple exposure, take account of cognitive load* in the form of diversions of attention. The load on working memory as learners process the new information takes effort when it is not yet embedded in long-term memory, so the fewer distractions in the room the better.

*Cognitive load is the amount of mental effort required to learn new information and to undertake learning activities. It is compromised by extraneous distractions…..

These are 4 of the Quick Find Solutions available on SLEUTH™ in the area of High Impact Teacher Practices: Multiple Exposures ​(0.71 Hattie 2009; 0.60 Spaced and Mass Practice Hattie 2018).

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