Inés Dussel
Researcher and Professor at the Department of Educational Research, CINVESTAV

Bio and Research Interest

Born in the US but raised in Argentina, Inés Dussel became a researcher in education early on her career, doing studies in the history and sociology of education. She directed the Education Area of the Latin American School for Social Sciences in Argentina from 2001 to 2008. At this institution she ran projects on media literacy, citizenship education, and curriculum reform, which included research, teacher education, and media production. She created the network “Tramas” for audiovisual literacy and citizenship education with colleagues from Argentina, Chile, and Perú. She was an advisor to the Program Conectar Igualdad, which distributed laptops to 5 million secondary school students in Argentina. She moved to Mexico City in 2011, where she became Researcher and Professor at the Department of Educational Research, CINVESTAV.

Irene-Anna Diakidoy
Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Cyprus

Bio and Research Interests

Irene-Anna Diakidoy is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Cyprus, specializing in learning and cognition. She is a founding member of the interdepartmental graduate program in Cognitive Systems, which is jointly run by the departments of Psychology and Computer Science. She served an elected four-year term as Vice-Rector of Academic Affairs at the University of Cyprus. In that position, she was responsible for all matters pertaining to research, innovation, and teaching. Under her initiative, the university developed and implemented several policies for research and innovation, as well as a set of codes of ethics for research, teaching, work, and study at the University of Cyprus. As she served at a state university, she was also active in promoting the legislative amendments required by many of these initiatives for the University of Cyprus Law. She has also been an active member of the Research and Innovation Strategy Group (RISG) of the European Universities Association (EUA).

Dr Diakidoy earned her PhD at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she worked with Richard C. Anderson. She taught at the University of South Dakota as an Assistant Professor before coming to the University of Cyprus. Her primary research area is the comprehension and learning from text, including (a) the development of expository text comprehension, (b) the influence of text structure in conceptual change learning in science, and (c) the connection between text comprehension and text-based argument evaluation. This work has focused primarily on the influence of text-related factors on reading outcomes. Her more recent work connects two separate lines of research: text comprehension and critical thinking, and their contributions to belief formation/change, learning, and decision-making. Her work has been published in high-impact journals, and she has been an invited or keynote speaker at universities and conferences internationally. She has been a long-standing member of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, the International Literacy Association, and the Society for Text and Discourse, and has served on journal editorial boards and as a reviewer and organizer of national and international conferences.

Head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovations at Jacobs University, Bremen

(Germany)

J. Douglas Willms
President, The Learning Bar

Research Interest

Dr. J. Douglas Willms is a member of the US National Academy of Education, Past-President of the International Academy of Education Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. From 1995 to 2018, Dr. Willms was Professor of Education at the University of New Brunswick, where for eight years he held the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Chair in Human Development and for fourteen years held the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Literacy and Human Development. He is the President of The Learning Bar, an international company that provides research-based tools and training for enhancing the life chances of children and youth.

Dr. Willms has published over two hundred research articles and monographs pertaining to youth literacy, children’s health, the accountability of schooling systems, and the assessment of national reforms. He played lead roles in developing Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). He and his colleagues designed the Early Years Evaluation (EYE), an instrument for the direct assessment of children’s developmental skills at ages 3 to 6, and OurSchool, an evaluation system for the continuous monitoring of student engagement and well-being. Dr. Willms is the lead researcher in designing the contextual questionnaires for PISA for Development, an initiative for low- and middle-income countries aimed at tracking international educational targets in the post-2015 UN framework. His research team is also working with school leaders in 30 First Nations schools in the design and implementation of Confident Learners, a whole-school and whole-community literacy program based on the science of literacy and instructional practice.

Jacqueline P. Leighton

Bio and Research Interests

JACQUELINE P. LEIGHTON was born in Santiago, Chile and immigrated to Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) in 1975 and then to Canada (Calgary) in 1978. Leaving her homeland of Chile in 1975, two years after the coup d'etat and the start of the Pinochet dictatorship, which brought on significant human rights violations against those who spoke out against the dictatorship, instilled in her a lifelong commitment to independent, critical thinking, fundamental human rights, and specifically freedom of expression. This commitment is observed in her ongoing research interests in human development, cognition and its translation into fair educational methods and practices, inclusive of cognitive diagnostic assessment and think aloud interviews.

Professor Jari Lavonen

Professor in Physics and Chemistry Education at the University of Helsinki

Bio and Research Interests

Jari Lavonen has been researching science and technology education and teacher education for the last thirty years. His main research interests include science and technology teaching, learning and assessment; interest, motivation and engagement in learning; curriculum development; teacher education; and the use of education technology in education. He has published more than 600 publications, together with colleagues, 130 of them are refereed papers in journals, 130 refereed papers in international books. 

Jonathan D. Jansen

Bio and Research Interest

Jonathan D. Jansen is a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University and president of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He was born in Montagu and grew up in Steenberg and Retreat. He completed his BSc at the University of the Western Cape and his teaching credentials at Unisa before doing an MS at Cornell University and a PhD at Stanford University. He was a high school biology teacher in Vredenburg and District Six and spent the rest of his career in university teaching and leadership around South Africa. In addition to his work in changing schools, he leads a major project on behalf of the Minister of Higher Education that prepares promising young academics from the 26 public universities for the professoriate. His research is broadly concerned with the politics of knowledge, as laid out in his award-winning book, Knowledge in the blood.

Prof. Dr. Drs. Jürgen Baumert
Director and Professor for Education

Research Interest

Large-scale assessment (TIMSS and PISA), learning and instruction in mathematics, teacher expertise, longitudinal studies on development in childhood and adolescence, and institutions as differential learning environments.

Professor and Director of Cross-cultural Assessment and Research Methods in Education (CARME)

AREAS OF RESEARCH INTEREST
Educational measurement and research methods in education
Cross-cultural and language issues in measurement
Validity of assessment and research generalizations

SELECTED POSITIONS
Member, International Test Commission Council (2012 - )
Member, Board of Directors of the National Council on Measurement in Education (2008-2011)
Member of the US National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Assessment (1998-2001)
Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (2000 – present)

Karen Mundy

Bio and Research Interests

Karen Mundy is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.  Professor Mundy’s award-winning research is focused on the work of international organizations and transnational actors in education, and on educational reform and educational leadership in the global south.  She has served as President of the Comparative Education Society (2014-2015) and as Chief Technical Officer of the Global Partnership for Education (2014-2018).   She was a member of the UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education which prepared the report “Re-imagining our futures together: Towards a new social contract for education”. Her early career was spent as a teacher, researcher and consultant in East and Southern Africa.