But of course much human learning is cognitively mediated, so the notion of feedback becomes a far more useful term in analyzing how people do learn from what happens to them. Feedback is a valuable notion in that it highlights the information people need in order to make subtle adjustments to keep themselves on track toward a goal. This is very rich concept.


What surprising things did we uncover? One striking thing has been the advent of approaches such as evolutionary thinking, biological factors, and findings that reflect the social brain hypothesis. When I trained, the brain was portrayed as a tabula rasa: Every action had to be ‘explained’ in terms of behavioural conditioning. Today, such a position is seen as just silly. We are creatures that evolved a large cortex in order to get on with our fellow species members. We monitor other people closely and mimic them totally unconsciously. We have a brain with millions of circuits already wired in. We evolved to this point not through thinking, but through watching others. Of all the species on the planet, we have the most sophisticated skills of observational learning. And it has been discovered, of late, that this capacity, is linked with the activation of mirror neurons in the brain. There is a neat tie-up between social learning theory and neuroscience.


One aspect that might surprise people is that we have virtually no fix anymore on what we used


to call ‘learning abilities’. The notion of ‘ability’ is somewhat of a problem since abilities are not fixed things. Instead, your ability reflects your prior knowledge, which reflects your experiences through life. Of course we are not born equal: But the term ability fails to explain learning, and really cannot be used to explain why someone fails to learn.


Instead of ‘abilities’, it is more useful to describe human learning in terms of ‘capacities’. We have capacities such as the working memory, or perhaps the amount of effort we can muster, or the sheer number of people we can relate to as individuals. We fail to learn once we reach capacity limits, and this is one major explanation of any failure to learn. To understand human capacity limits is far more useful to a teacher than attempting to analyze native abilities.


And another surprising thing is the extent to which we learn unconsciously. The unconscious exists, yes, but as a repository of implicit knowledge, rather than as a source of unpleasant drives.


Would you encourage somebody who has an undergrad degree to take a postgrad psychology degree and if so why? John Hattie: Yes, both Psychology and more specifically educational psychology are not only fascinating but there are many employment options. Every teacher should be immersed in the psychology of learning,


know many theories of learning (as students do not always follow any one theory!), and study educational psychology as central to their maximizing their impact in the classroom.


What career paths can a postgrad degree in educational psychology lead to? John Hattie: The main vocation is a deeper and richer understanding of teaching. Ed Psychs can work with teachers to enhance their conceptions of learning, to know how to measure learning, how to see learning in its various stages, how to teach students the core processes of learning. There are related jobs in special education, gifted, assessment and diagnosis, setting up and monitoring interventions, one-on-one and small groups sessions, and careers in research and teaching ed psych


Do you hope that your latest work will have a lasting influence upon teaching methods? John Hattie: This is always the hope when writing a book. If Greg and I can raise the level of debate, can entice readers to want to know more about learning, to stop and say “that’s interesting”


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