Associate Faculty | People | EQI
People
Associate Faculty
Professor Herbert Altrichter
Herbert Altrichter is currently Full Professor of Education and Educational Psychology and Head of Department at Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. He is also the programme leader of the University’s MA in ‘School Management’. A native from Vienna, Austria, he earned his PhD in Education 1978 from the University of Vienna and started his career as lecturer at the Universities of Vienna and Klagenfurt. After some international experiences as visiting scholar to Cambridge and Deakin University (Australia) he was appointed Associate Professor of Business Education at the University of Innsbruck (1991). From 1994-1999 Herbert Altrichter was Austrian Delegate to the Governing Board of the Centre for Research and Innovation in Education (CERI, OECD, Paris). He was the founding president of the Austrian Educational Research Association (ÖFEB) and is now Treasurer of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) (2013-2017). Herbert also founded and edits learned journals (journal für schulentwicklung, journal für lehrerinnen- und lehrerbildung, journal für Praxisforschung, Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung) and has undergone a training as organizational consultant.
His research interests include educational governance studies (school development and system reform), evaluation, teacher education and qualitative research methodology. His book ‘Teachers Investigate Their Work’ saw its 4th edition in German in 2007 and its 2nd English in 2008; translations in Greek and Chinese are available. Within the research field governance studies he conducts empirical studies about changes which have been triggered by innovations on various levels of the school system and have an impact of in-school and system-wide governance (e.g. Schulentwicklung durch Schulprofilierung? (2011); The Effects of a Free School Choice Policy on Parents’ School Choice Behaviour (2011); Bildungsstandards und externe Überprüfung von Schülerkompetenzen (2012); School decentralisation as a process of differentiation, hierarchization and selection (2014)). Recently, he has done research on school inspections and quality management regimes (Impact of school inspections on teaching and learning – describing assumptions on causal mechanisms in six European countries (2013); Neue Schulinspektion und Qualitätsmanagement im Schulsystem (2013); Does Accountability Pressure through School Inspections Promote School Improvement? (2015)). Additionally, he is interested in the conceptual and methodological foundation of governance studies (e.g. Theory and Evidence on Governance: conceptual and empirical strategies of research on governance in education (2010); Handbuch Neue Steuerung im Schulsystem (2010); Governance – Steuerung und Handlungskoordination bei der Transformation von Bildungssystemen (2011); Educational Governance als Forschungsperspektive (2013)).
Dr Richard Boyle
Richard is Head of Research, Publishing and Corporate Relations at the Institute of Public Administration, responsible for planning and management of research and publications functions. He has carried out a wide range of research and consultancy studies on aspects of public service management including public sector reform, performance measurement, evaluation, the management of cross-cutting issues, and long-term policy thinking. Richard’s major areas of specialisation include public sector performance management, monitoring and evaluation systems, and public service change and reform programmes. He is an expert on evaluation, is Chair of the Irish Evaluation Network, and has served on the board of the European Evaluation Society. He has provided support to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in a number of monitoring and evaluation reform initiatives. In recent years Richard has been engaged in a number of major consultancy projects for public sector organisations in Ireland, particularly in the fields of programme evaluation, strategic management, organisational restructuring and performance management. He has also conducted research for the third sector on government funding of voluntary and community organisations. Internationally, he has conducted research on behalf of the European Commission, the OECD, and the World Bank. Among his many publications is The State of Policy Evaluation in Ireland (2014). Richard has over 30 years experience of working with public sector organisations, including over 25 years with the IPA. Before joining the IPA Richard worked in local government in London.
Dr Melanie Ehren
Melanie Ehren is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Education, working on research into effects and unintended consequences of high stakes testing, accountability systems and school inspections on school improvement and teaching and learning in schools. Her research started with a PhD on effects of school inspections. In this research she used novel techniques such as a policy theory evaluation to reconstruct the assumptions on effects of school inspections. Her paper on ‘The Relationship between School Inspections, School Characteristics and School Improvement, co-authored by Adrie Visscher, was placed on the 2010 highest cited article list of the British Journal of Educational Studies. Melanie Ehren has studied the effectiveness of accountability systems and external evaluations on school improvement in many different countries and contexts. She was part of the OECD expert team reviewing the Evaluation and Assessment in Education in Luxembourg; she studied the effects of different types of accountability measures (e.g. quality reviews) in New York City and Boston as part of a visiting scholarship at Columbia and Harvard University (sponsored by the Spencer foundation). She wrote an expert opinion on ‘Educational performance standards and external’ testing for the Austrian National Education Report of 2012, received the Austrian ‘excellent researcher stipend’ to teach at the University of Linz in June 2012 and was contracted by UNICEF to review the inspection system in Zanzibar/Tanzania.
She recently coordinated a three-year research project on the impact of school inspections on school improvement in six European countries (financed by the European Committee Life Long learning) and currently coordinates the Special Interest Group on ‘Educational Evaluation, Accountability and School Improvement’ of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) with professor Maag Merki. She is currently also leading an Erasmus+ comparative study on the impact of (‘polycentric’) school inspections, a Nuffield funded project on teachers’ responses to high stakes testing in Mathematics, and a systematic literature review on the impact of accountability systems in developing countries (funded by the UK Department for International Development). She is also the program leader of the Institute of Education’s MA in ‘Evaluation, Inspection and Educational Improvement’.
Professor Stafford Hood
Stafford Hood is the Sheila M. Miller Professor of Education, Associate Dean for Research and Research Education, and Founding Director of the newly established Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he also holds appointments as Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Psychology. Prior to this appointment he also served as the Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. His research and scholarly activities focus primarily on the role of culture in educational assessment and culturally responsive approaches in program evaluation. Dr. Hood was also the founding Co-Director of the annual national conference on the Relevance of Assessment and Culture in Evaluation that was sponsored by the College of Education at Arizona State University from 2000 to 2007 and has served as the principal investigator on several grants funded by the National Science Foundation. He has served on many national advisory boards and committees including the Educational Testing Service’s Visiting Panel for Research, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Technical Advisory Committee, American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s NSF funded “Building an Indigenous Framework for STEM Evaluation” project, and Robert Woods Johnson Foundations Evaluation Fellowship program to name only a few. His professional service also includes President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) SIG/Research Focus on Black Education, Co-Editor of the AERA journal Educational Researcher Features Section and editorial boards of the AERA journals Review of Educational Research and American Educational Research Journal. He also currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Evaluation Association’s journals American Journal of Evaluation and New Directions for Evaluation. He was selected as a Fellow of the American Council on Education in 2001.
Stafford Hood was recently appointed as Adjunct Professor at the School of Edcuation Studies, Dublin City University
Professor Peter Tymms
Professor Peter TymmsPhD is Director of iPIPS and international study of children starting school. He was Head of Department in the School of Education at Durham University until 2013 and before that Director of CEM at Durham University which runs projects monitoring million pupils across the UK and beyond each year. His main research interests include monitoring, assessment, interventions and research methodology generally. He set up the PIPS (Performance Indicators in Primary Schools Project) which runs in thousands of schools around the world. Peter Tymms is an adviser to the German National Educational Panel Study.