Staff
Nafisa Awwal
03 9035 4001 n.awwal@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Nafisa specialises in the design, development and implementation of web-based educational assessments, reporting and other data collection tools. She manages system integration and architecture for traditional and innovative, individual and collaborative assessments for students in multiple languages. She is also involved in data management, analysis and item writing.
Her research interests are focused on the assessment and measurement of 21st century skills, including application of novel technologies in delivering automated tests and reporting to teachers and students.
Dr Farhan Azim
farhan.azim@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Farhan currently works across projects nationally and internationally developing psychometrically sound assessments. His research interests include development of novel assessment instruments, measurement theory, teachers' assessment capacity building, and better use of student data for teaching.
Farhan's PhD was in the area of assessment of mathematical problem solving. He has previously worked in other areas of assessment including teachers' assessment literacy, assessment in STEM, etc. He has also worked in research, monitoring and evaluation of large-scale education projects and taught assessment and research related courses at tertiary institutes in the past. His works have been disseminated through refereed journals, book chapters and international academic conferences.
Melissa Bao
03 8344 5733 m.bao@unimelb.edu.au
Project Manager
Melissa works on projects relating to the assessment and recognition of complex competencies at the ARC. She is experienced in delivering research and innovation projects across the tertiary sector as well as conducting stakeholder management across industry and government. Prior to her current role, she spent several years as a team leader in the researcher development space, working to support the development of innovative research across multiple disciplines.
Daniel Jimenez Barrios
Programmer
Daniel Jimenez is a programmer within the Assessment Research Centre. He specialises in the development of a wide spectrum of enterprise level solutions, which include web, client/server and desktop applications.
His expertise encompass the development of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules, Control Systems, Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Business Intelligence/Analytics (BI) within a rich variety of business contexts such as car manufacturing, utilities, health and education.
He has a sound career in database management, data modeling, data extraction, data consolidation and data transformation for the most successful relational database management systems. He is also skilled in forecasting, simulation and optimisation. Daniel’s interests focus on SDLC best practices.
Dr Bruce Beswick
03 9035 8718 bruceab@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Bruce works across a range of projects developing assessment materials and exploring challenges in assessment practice. His most recent work has focused on the assessment of general capabilities. Bruce has a strong interest in the exploration of differences in evaluation and judgement and he completed a PhD in aesthetic judgement in 2012.
Narelle English
03 9035 5748 narelle.english@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Narelle is a Research Fellow, Lecturer in assessment and Doctoral candidate at the Assessment Research Centre, University of Melbourne. Her research projects are assessment related and she works on projects relating to developmental learning and the design and development of data collection tools and assessments. She has designed and implemented assessment for teaching programs in the Master of Teaching, Master of Education, the Network of Schools project within the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, and the Department of Education’s Bastow Institute. She is currently working on projects with the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership in formative assessment and the Bastow Institute of Educational Leadership on a principal assessment.
Narelle has also taught and held leadership positions in department schools in Victoria, and overseas in the US state system and an international school in Japan.
Jayne Johnston
03 8344 4926 jayne.johnston@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Acting Deputy Director, Melbourne Enterprise Fellow
Jayne's current research and development interests include the assessment and recognition of complex competencies, supporting schools and systems to understand and use developmental assessment tools to support teaching and personalise learning and explorations of alternate designs for credentialing student work at graduation.
Jayne has had over 20 years’ experience in senior executive positions in public education departments in WA, ACT and SA with roles including curriculum and assessment design, leadership development and the design of improvement and accountability systems. Prior to joining the ARC, Jayne was Deputy Chief Executive in the South Australian Department of Education and Child Development, responsible for leading preschool and school improvement in over 900 sites across the state. She was a board member of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority and served on a number of national and state level working parties. Jayne began her career as a secondary mathematics teacher in WA where she led the development of the First Steps in Mathematics teaching and learning resources and was founding director of the WA Professional Learning Institute.
Dr Toshiko Kamei
03 8344 7287 kamei.t@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Toshiko has worked on projects to investigate the assessment and recognition of competencies in school age students and adults.
Her main focus has been to work on the SWANs/ABLES project that aims to develop resources to assess foundational skills in students with disability. Prior to her time at the Centre, she taught in primary, secondary and specialist settings in Canada, England, Japan and Australia.
Toshiko’s research interests include the assessment of complex competencies, measurement theory, and raising the capacity of teachers to educate all students.
Debbie Krapywnyj
03 9035 4677 debbie.krapywnyj@unimelb.edu.au
Centre Coordinator
Debbie’s work includes managing the financial, human resources and administrative functions of the Centre.
Debbie provides operational advice and support to ARC staff and students in accordance with University policies and procedures.
Dr Rebekah Luo
03 8344 8432 rebekah.luo@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Rebekah’s area of interest and expertise is in the assessment and credentialing of general capabilities or complex competencies.
She leads research and consultancy projects relating to micro-credentialing and development of instruments or methodologies to assess complex competencies. She is also involved in other types of work such as evaluation projects and independent reviews of assessment systems or instruments.
Joshua McGrane
Associate Professor of Measurement Analytics
Associate Professor Joshua McGrane was formerly Deputy Director of the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment and a Senior Research Fellow. He completed his university medal-winning PhD in Quantitative Psychology at the University of Sydney. He has also been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia and worked as the Psychometrician for the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE) in the New South Wales Department of Education. As a result, he has extensive experience in academic and government contexts in educational assessment, including being an expert advisor for several national and international government and non-profit organisations. His research and teaching interests span the philosophical, empirical and statistical aspects of psychometrics. He is presently working on several projects including the development of a meta-framework for measurement across the physical and social sciences, combining psychometric and AI modelling to predict and explain bias in educational assessments, evaluating the critical thinking skills of secondary students internationally, and the development of language assessments for understudied languages.
Ruth McHale
03 9035 5077 ruth.mchale@unimelb.edu.au
Administrative Officer
Ruth is the Administrative Officer within the Assessment Research Centre. Working closely with the Business, Operations and Commercialisation Manager, Ruth provides a high level of administrative support to the Centre to ensure the delivery of the core Centre outcomes. In addition, Ruth provides day to day support for the Centre Director and assists in the administration of HR associated issues.
Dr Sadia Nawaz
03 8344 1616 nawaz.s@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Sadia Nawaz is a Research Fellow, working with the psychometrics team at the Assessment Research Centre. She helps analyse the assessments data to report on data collection issues, data reliability and validity. Sadia also assists with automatic reports generation for Ruby.
Sadia’s doctoral research encompasses concepts from learning analytics, data science, cognitive science and education technology. In her PhD research, she analysed learners’ affective states, such as confusion. She also analysed the moment by moment changes in learners’ task difficulties within simulation-based learning environments and assessed how task difficulties could manifest behaviorally. Sadia is passionate to conduct rigorous research for understanding how students learn and how their learning experiences can be facilitated.
Sadia is passionate to give back to society. In recognition of her volunteer activities, she was awarded the Leaders in Communities Award (LiCA) - 2020 and was also nominated for the Melbourne Community Excellence Award (2019).
Dr Cuc Nguyen
03 8344 9540 cuc.nguyen@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Senior Research Fellow
Dr Nguyen has been working for the Assessment Research Centre since 2003. She has extensive experience in large-scale assessment and survey design, with particular expertise in instrument development, sampling design, data management and data analysis. Dr Nguyen is skilled in the development and validation of instruments for measuring knowledge, skills and competencies, and application of Item Response Theory, Structural Equation Modelling and Multi-level Modelling.
She has taught highly specialised postgraduate subjects and professional development courses in assessment and quantitative methods, including Introductory Assessment Design, Quantitative Methods, Large Scale Assessment in Evaluation, Scale Development and Analysis, Introduction to Assessment, Statistics and Software in Measurement and Evaluation, and Projects in Evaluation and Assessment. She has been involved in research, teaching and coordinating capacity building courses for Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Mongolia, Singapore, Sri-lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Dr Lan Anh Nguyen Khoa
Research Fellow
Lan Anh is a Research Fellow at the Assessment Research Centre who believes that assessment is to inform teaching. Her primary research interests are psychometrics, educational measurement and applied statistics focused on competency-based assessment and large-scale assessments (PISA, TIMSS).
Lan Anh has extensive research experience in developing and reporting on the validity and reliability of instruments using a variety of computer software packages, including Mplus, ACER ConQuest, Facet model, Pascal, and R programming language, SAS, IBM SPSS Statistics. She can also apply Item Response Theory, Structural Equation Modelling, and Multi-level Modelling.
Her PhD research focused on modelling generic problem-solving underlying domain-specific and domain-general problem-solving. Before joining the University of Melbourne, Lan Anh worked for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and she spent 15 years teaching pre-teachers for the Department of Physics, Hue University. Her work has been recognised in refereed journals, book chapters, international academic conferences. She was also awarded the Melbourne Education Research Institute Research Higher Degree Travelling Scholarship (2019), and the Melbourne Graduate School of Education Thesis to Publications Awards (2021).
Dr Jason Pietzner
03 8344 8699 jason.pietzner@unimelb.edu.au
Lecturer
Jason's PhD examined the development of critical thinking in secondary students. Before this Dr Pietzner worked in primary and secondary schools for a period of 18 years where he was a generalist primary and VCE philosophy and English teacher as well as holding a variety of leadership positions. Dr Pietzner has lectured in a range of subjects in the MGSE in the areas of assessment, pedagogy, and philosophy of education and has supervised teacher candidates in schools. Jason is currently involved in national and international projects with schools and education departments in the areas of general capabilities assessment, micro-credentialing and competency-based education.
Angela Pollock
03 8344 1485 angela.pollock@unimelb.edu.au
Director, Melbourne Assessment (Research-Practice Partnerships)
Angela leads the Melbourne Graduate School of Education’s flagship research collaborations with Australian primary and secondary schools, including the New Metrics for Success research-practice partnership and the Melbourne Assessment community. The work focuses on the assessment and credentialing of complex competencies, powering schools to assess and report on traditionally difficult to assess areas of learning. Angela’s work involves bringing schools, academics, industry and policy together to influence educational transformation. She holds a Master of School Leadership and is passionate about the impact effective collaborations can have on in-school practice, enabling young people to thrive today and in the future.
Vipul Poojara
vipulkumar.poojara@unimelb.edu.au
Senior Fullstack Developer
Vipul works as a Senior Full stack Developer for the Assessment Research Centre. Vipul has over 19 years experience in providing technical solutions to solve complex business problems using cutting edge technologies. He has worked on multiple projects across several business domains including Government, Real Estate, Financial Services, Education and Healthcare.
He has in depth technical knowledge of Web Development and Cloud Computing, he is Proficient in architecting and developing applications using Design Patterns & SOLID principles and has extensive hands-on knowledge of software development
Vipul has extensive onsite experience in onsite-offshore models and has managed large geographically distributed engineering teams to develop and enhance web-based applications and is able to provide timely and accurate technical guidance and support to the team members
Ben Reeves
Research Fellow
Ben Reeves is a Research Fellow and PhD candidate in the Assessment Research Centre (ARC). He has particular research interests in assessing general capabilities, ethics education and learner agency. He has recently developed an assessment framework to support the teaching of ethical decision-making and inquiry. In 2020 he was awarded the Melbourne University Frieda Cohen prize for most meritorious education research thesis.
Ben has over14 years experience teaching Philosophy, English, Critical Thinking and Ethics, and IBDP Theory of Knowledge, running departments and leading professional learning communities. He has presented numerous workshops on concept-based learning, visible thinking, teaching and assessing ethical capability, and collaborative problem-solving; and lead collaborative school networks combining Harvard Cultures of Thinking and instructional rounds methodology. He is currently a member of the ARC New Metrics for Success research team.
Professor Field Rickards
03 8344 8427 f.rickards@unimelb.edu.au
Professor Rickards is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Assessment Research Centre, and is co-director of the Assessment, Curriculum and Technology Research Centre based in the Philippines. He is a Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne School of Government and leads research on policy for education and health in the early years. He was Dean of Education at the University of Melbourne from August 2004 to July 2017. In 2013 received the Sir James Darling Medal from the Australian College of Educators (Victorian Branch) in recognition of his ‘profound’ impact on education in Victorian and Australia. He has been awarded the tile of Dean Emeritus by the University for his ‘sustained transformational leadership’.
Dr Pam Robertson
03 8344 9537 p.robertson@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Research Fellow
Pam is a Research Fellow at the Assessment Research Centre and works on projects relating to developmental learning, assessment delivery and the use of assessment data to inform teaching. She is also Deputy-Director of the Assessment Curriculum and Technology Research Centre, a joint initiative between the University of Melbourne and the University of the Philippines. Pam is experienced in the development, analysis, validation and evaluation of objective and rubric-based assessment materials tailored for specific purposes, including the assessment of complex competencies. She has been involved in numerous projects involving the development of assessment materials and their alignment to curricula, and her PhD explored the use of learning progressions to inform curriculum sequencing and pacing.
Pam is an experienced designer and presenter of professional learning on using assessment for classroom teaching. She lectures in the Master of Education and Master of Teaching courses and has delivered extensive professional learning programs in Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and short sessions for educators in India and Papua New Guinea. Pam has previously spent many years as a teacher of mathematics, science and physics in Victorian schools and has held a range of mid-level leadership positions in schools.
Hilary Slater
03 9035 4425 h.slater@unimelb.edu.au
Business, Operations and Commercialisation Manager
Hilary is responsible for providing leadership and operational management of the Assessment Research Centre's research, engagement and commercial operations and provides high quality expertise and planning to deliver strategies in line with the goals and objectives of the Centre. She manages the Centre's provision of online assessment and reporting products for research, government and commercial clients and fulfils the role of Project Manager for several of the Centre's projects. She leads a team of professional staff responsible for a range of services that support the administration, development and delivery of high quality research, engagement and consultancy projects.
She completed her Masters of Project Management in 2019.
Professor Mark Wilson
wilson.m@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Professor of Assessment
Mark's interests focus on measurement and applied statistics. His work spans a range of issues in measurement and assessment from the development of new statistical models for analysing measurement data, to the development of new assessments in subject matter areas such as science education, patient-reported outcomes and child development, to policy issues in the use of assessment data in accountability systems.
Faye Xu
03 9035 4438 faye.xu@unimelb.edu.au
Communications and Project Manager
Faye plays a central role in delivering on research, engagement and commercial priorities associated with Assessment Research Centre’s research-practice partnerships and other school engagement projects. Her responsibilities include managing various research and commercial projects to ensure partnerships meet specified objectives, developing and disseminating communications across digital platforms and managing events to build interest and engagement in the programs.
Faye is an experienced tertiary education manager with over 11 years’ experience in both onshore and offshore teams of Group of Eight universities. She has demonstrated success in commercialisation project and partnership management, stakeholder relationship development, research activity coordination and international collaborations. Faye holds a Master of Commerce (Marketing) from the University of Adelaide and a Bachelor of Management (International Business) from Shandong University, China.
Richard Xu
Chief Technology Officer
Richard works as the Chief Technology Officer for ARC’s new Ruby assessment platform - a major, world class, research-based, strategic initiative of the Assessment Research Centre, designed to support the implementation of competency-based, evidence-oriented teaching and learning. Richard oversees its architecture design, development, security and governance. Richard pushes this platform to be cloud-based and also on-premises capable, with modern technologies and practices. By working closely with researchers, Richard is able to demonstrate outstanding research-based pedagogy results, from a robust enterprise grade software system. Ruby system has been successfully rolled out for the clients like Ministry of Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Department of Education and Training, Victoria and Latrobe Valley Authority.
Dr Zhonghua Zhang
03 9035 8597 zhonghua.zhang@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert
Senior Research Fellow
Zhonghua’s expertise lies in the area of educational measurement and statistics.
He works on the application of advanced quantitative methods in educational and psychological studies. His studies have been published in refereed journals, book chapters and international academic conferences.