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.
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