Gavin T. L. Brown

I am an “Adult Third-Culture Kid”; born in Scotland, lived in Canada from age 1 to 10, and spent 10 years in Western Europe between ages 10 and 21. After 7 years in Montreal, I moved to New Zealand in 1983 where I worked as a high school English and ESOL teacher, a test development researcher and research manager, and as a senior lecturer of research methodology at The University of Auckland. I spent 3 years in Hong Kong at the Institute of Education where I extended my research into Chinese contexts. My research focus is on school-based assessment, informed by psychometric theory, with a special focus on the social psychology of people’s responses to educational assessment. Hence, I focus on measuring academic performance, affective attitudes, and investigating how assessment is understood by students and teachers. I am currently carrying out cross-cultural research investigating socio-cultural factors that explain systematic differences between societies in how teachers and students conceive of assessment. In addition to giving papers at international academic conferences, I have given talks on educational assessment topics in Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Queensland, New Zealand, and South Africa. I am especially interested in supervising research students who will undertake a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research around teachers' and/or students' thinking about and practices of assessment and the impact of those conceptions and practices on educational outcomes for students.