A prominent education researcher in Australia is demanding compensation from a critic whose claims of plagiarism triggered the university to look into his work. Although the resulting examination of work by John Hattie, director of an education research institute at the University of Melbourne, ended without a finding of misconduct, the critic, Stephen Vainker, insists Hattie’s publications are rife with data errors and insufficient attribution.
Vainker came across “strange” citations in a paper by Hattie while studying for his doctorate in education management seven years ago. At first, he found 12 sentences lifted word-for-word, he said, from the original source about workplace management without proper citation. Among them were seven instances in which words such as “people” or “individuals” were changed to education-related words, such as “students.”
Then Vainker looked through Hattie’s most popular and influential text, Visible Learning, and its sequel, as well as his doctoral thesis, finding what he claimed were hundreds of data errors and examples of plagiarism.
“I looked up what they wrote that [Hattie] was citing,” Vainker, now a teacher in England, told Retraction Watch. “And then I just realized it was exactly the same, word-for-word.”
Vainker compiled his findings into two non-peer reviewed articles, and sent them last summer to the University of Melbourne. According to a report we have seen, the university has decided Vainker’s findings don’t warrant further investigation, despite finding errors in Hattie’s work they thought should be corrected, and deficiencies in his citation practices.
Since reporting his findings, Vainker has heard from Hattie’s lawyers demanding he apologize, retract his comments and withdraw his complaint to the university.
Hattie maintains that he has never plagiarized another person’s work, according to a letter his lawyers sent us. Hattie also claims Vainker’s “defamatory” allegations constitute “cyber-bullying and trolling.” In May, Hattie commenced formal legal proceedings against Vainker in the Supreme Court of Victoria, in Australia, after Vainker didn’t remove his allegations from online platforms.
When Visible Learning first came out in 2008, its central idea that educators could tangibly increase student learning through interventions — such as self-reported grades, timely feedback and positive teacher-student relationships — influenced schools around the world. Government reports cited the findings and they became part of an education reform movement.
Hattie’s book draws on more than 800 meta-analyses, or a collective total of more than 50,000 smaller studies, ranking interventions using a statistical measure called Cohen’s d, which describes the size of an effect. Since its release, Hattie has faced criticism about studies counted multiple times, incomparable populations and other statistical calculations.
In a letter sent on behalf of Hattie, his lawyers told us that he “welcomes healthy and respectful academic debate,” and has provided a “robust defence” of his research methods in an online series called The Gold Papers.
Vainker says he found more serious concerns in Hattie’s publications, alleging that Hattie has plagiarized 537 times in his Ph.D. thesis, Visible Learning and the book’s sequel, with 432 of those being insufficient paraphrasing and the others examples of copying the source material directly. Vainker also raised concerns about data errors in Hattie’s work, claiming that several meta-analyses had been incorrectly included because of issues with dependent and independent variables, as well as duplicated inclusions and papers that weren’t meta-analyses to begin with. He also claimed data had been extracted or presented incorrectly — amounting to more than 200 alleged errors in the data.
Vainker documented the first findings in a May 2024 manuscript titled “John Hattie’s failures of academic integrity and the fragility of the education reform movement.” He followed with a second manuscript in March this year, “The Career of John Hattie: Plagiarism, Misconduct, and the Coarsening of Education.” He also posted about his findings on the social media platform X.
In June 2024, Vainker took his findings to the University of Melbourne. The university conducted a preliminary assessment of whether the meta-analyses data in Hattie’s online database — essentially an online version of the data found in the book — had been falsified, fabricated or misrepresented, and whether Hattie had plagiarized material in the sequel to Visible Learning. Hattie produced both works while at the university.
A year later, in a letter we have seen that describes the results of the university’s assessment, Kate Smith-Miles, the university’s pro vice-chancellor of research capability, acknowledged to Vainker that the database contained “unintended” errors which “should be corrected,” and that Hattie could improve his citation practices. But she concluded that a formal investigation was not “necessary or appropriate” and that unintentional errors do not typically constitute research misconduct.
The university’s research integrity office did not directly respond to our questions about the investigation, saying the university “addresses all concerns about research integrity under the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, a structured process that prioritises procedural fairness, confidentiality and integrity.” They added that confidentiality “is essential to ensure any investigation process is conducted fairly. This includes protecting the rights of those raising concerns and those subject to review.”
According to Smith-Miles’ letter, the university engaged an independent expert, Michael Hebert of the University of California, Irvine, to look at the data errors. Hebert confirmed mistakes in 11 of the 14 randomly selected examples of data error, and identified 20 more possible errors. He attributed the issues to human error or methodological choices, but not deliberate falsification. The letter describes that Hattie disputed Hebert’s findings, calling the data errors“insignificant” to the database as a whole and “negligible at best.”
Hebert also recommended Hattie work with a team with broader expertise to improve the reliability of the database. Hattie rejected that suggestion, saying he personally coded the data with assistance from research aids, and that a big team was unnecessary. Hebert has not responded to requests for comment.
The university also reviewed 14 of the 181 alleged instances of plagiarism Vainker had submitted. It concluded none amounted to plagiarism, though 10 were potential examples of “questionable citation practices.” In the letter, Hattie defends his citations practices by referring to one of the leading citation style guides in social sciences research – the APA7 — which suggests against over-citing.
The University of Melbourne chose not to investigate further, although the report acknowledges that when taken as a whole, the citation errors “may suggest more widespread citation and referencing issues with The Sequel,” according to the letter.
Vainker criticized the university’s approach, saying they “wanted to sound as tough as possible in the report without actually fully investigating it.” He said there was “no possible reason to take a sample” instead of checking all 181 plagiarism allegations. “You could look at that in an hour, and you could check each one out in a week. They’ve taken a year,” he said.
Vainker asked the university which of the 14 examples of purported plagiarism it had chosen to review. In the same email, he pointed to 11 examples he said showed word-for-word copying. On July 11, a research integrity officer at the university acknowledged that the additional examples “have given rise to concerns which were not apparent from our initial random sample review.” The officer said the university was seeking additional information from Hattie, whose response would determine whether further action was warranted.
Vainker had previously sent Hattie the plagiarism allegations in his first publication from May 2024. That paper alleged that Hattie had taken text directly from goal-setting theorists, replacing workplace terms with educational ones.
Hattie responded August 2024, writing that academics “thrive on critique,” though it has been his policy “not to react to critiques.” He added:
You claim I have plagiarized, lack academic integrity, introduce false totals, am flippant, etc. These are serious charges. I strongly claim that these claims are unfair and untrue — the 3.5 pages that you focus on clearly relies on Locke and Latham’s work – as noted in the pages. I have checked with appropriate sources and they see no issues. It is clear I am indeed paraphrasing their work, adopting it into a more educational sphere, and there is NO doubt that this is Locke and Latham’s work. Further, there is NO evidence of plagiarism. The 7th ed APA Manual of Style clearly states that overciting should be avoided… there is no doubt that the work relies on and is attributed to Locke and Latham.
In the email, he invited Vainker to remove the “potentially defamatory” claims about plagiarism and republish the paper.
A few months after Hattie’s email, just before Christmas, Vainker heard from Hattie’s lawyers. Their letter accused Vainker of defamation over the 2024 paper and 12 posts on X about his findings.
Vainker’s posts on X accuse Hattie of plagiarism and failing to uphold academic standards, and call his database “total garbage.”
The lawyers demanded that he remove the paper and the posts, apologize, pay Hattie’s legal fees and compensation, and withdraw his complaint to the University of Melbourne’s Office of Research Integrity.
In a statement sent to us from his lawyers, Hattie said:
“I have never plagiarised another person’s work. I have always welcomed the fair and objective academic critique of my research and of Visible Learning. However, Dr Vainker’s article and his posts about me on X go well beyond this. He has engaged in a deliberate and personal attack on my reputation.
“Dr Vainker has published a voluminous number of posts and comments about me on X which he has acknowledged are designed to ruin my reputation and thereby bring an end to the education reform movement.
“In engaging in this vitriolic campaign against me and my work, Dr Vainker has himself failed to act with academic integrity. He has instead acted with malice. …
“Dr Vainker has never sought to discuss his views about my work with me or correspond with me in a respectful way as one would expect of a fellow academic. In those circumstances, his allegations that I have acted dishonestly and without integrity are simply indefensible.
“Publishing the article and his posts on X about me are part of a broader campaign Dr Vainker has waged against me, which is nothing short of cyber-bullying and trolling.”
The lawyers also told us that Hattie was unable to comment on the University of Melbourne’s investigation, citing confidentiality, but maintain that Vainker’s complaint to the university is “unsubstantiated.”
“I’ve done the work, I’ve checked it, I know I’m right,” Vainker said of the lawyers’ demands to him. “I think the only possible role it could have would be to scare me off, once you actually start getting into it… he hasn’t got a case.”
“I don’t think he could write the books that he has without plagiarizing,” Vainker said. “And so I think the plagiarism, I think it’s not just sloppiness, I think it’s essential to his work.”
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Very interesting case, though please note that “self-reported grades” and “positive student-teacher relationships” should not be labeled “interventions.” They are actually correlational results in Visible Learning. Feedback would count as an intervention, though.
What a whitewash by Melbourne Uni. If Hattie “welcomes healthy and respectful academic debate,” why is he trying to stifle the debate by taking it to court?
I’ve really never understood the focus on the quantitative aspects of identifying plagiarism: How many words, or how much percentage overlap, etc. Of course, the companies selling software tools want to provide a metric that sounds good to their customers. Maybe lawyers like the metrics, but plagiarism is about passing off the intellectual property of others as your own, not about some number. I think representing the intellectual property (IP) of someone else as your own is flat out unethical, no matter what the metrics say.
Here, you have an institution employing someone (which costs money) who is getting grants (which costs money) to publish papers (which costs money)… therefore, shouldn’t *someone* care if that money is well spent? In this case, there seem to be large parts in their publications *that this person has admitted* are the intellectual output of other authors – with minor adaptations as to context; so why are we arguing about how many quotations marks and sequences of words prove this? The author has acknowledged that they are repackaging the work of others for a different use case.
I’m not the one writing the checks in this case, but as a general rule, I don’t think taxpayer money should be used for recycled research. I don’t even think non-original research should be rewarded. Not with publicly-funded employment. Not with publicly-supported tenure. Not with public grants… especially when there is a commercial tail. People who want to adapt published research for commercial purposes can do so, after they have secured the proper IP rights.
[A necessary aside: Yes, all scholarship builds on prior work – that’s not my point. I’m suggesting in cases like this where there seems to be little “new” added to the ideas, whether you put a tag of “plagiarism” on it or not is not the main issue. The main issue is the research is just not very valuable. I think that’s the underlying frustration expressed by Dr. Vainker]