Sandra Milligan
Enterprise Professor & Executive Director, Melbourne Metrics
Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia
Enterprise Professor Sandra Milligan is Executive Director of Melbourne Metrics at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. Sandra has an unusually wide engagement with the education industry and in educational research.
Originally a teacher of science and mathematics, she is also a former Director of Curriculum in an Australian state education department and has held senior research, management and governance positions in a range of educational organisations, including government agencies, not-for-profits, small start-up businesses and large, listed, international corporations. Sandra’s current research interests focus on assessment, recognition and warranting of hard-to-assess learning. She directs several research partnerships with school networks and organisations working to develop Learner Profiles for their students. She is lead author of Future Proofing Australian Students with New Credentials report, outlining methods to reliably assess and recognise the level of attainment of general capabilities, and of Report 1: Recognition of learning success for all.
She was co-founder of The Good Universities Guide series, and has a background in technology commercialisation in education. She is the Convenor of a Melbourne University MOOC targeting professional learning for teachers in the area of assessment and teaching of 21C skills, which has to date has enrolled over 30,000 teachers worldwide.
Keynote
The Singapore MOE’s education framework for 21st Century Competencies emphasises the important of developing skills such as critical, adaptive and inventive thinking, communication, collaboration and other future ready skills. Such skills are integral to preparing students for the modern world. Professor Sandra Milligan and her team of philosophers, psychometricians and teachers at the University of Melbourne have been working over the last decade, in partnership with ‘first mover’ schools in Australia, the US, and SE Asia to develop next generation methods and techniques for assessing and recognising these skills. These ‘next gen’ methods are very different from traditional methods of assessment and certification (e.g., examinations, standardised or written tests, essays). The ‘next gen’ techniques are competency-based, developmental, performance-based, calibrated against universal standards, and rely on digitally-supported human judgement. Schools report that being able to generate reliable, valid, informative assessments of competence empowers students and teachers alike, and gives these skills the importance they are due. They enable answers to questions such as: How can teachers understand what good performance looks like in these skills? How can we tell if a student is developing? How and when should we report on attainments? Can reports be trusted? How should these attainments be taken into account to support transition from one phase of schooling to another? In this address, Professor Milligan will outline the theory underpinning the ‘next gen’ approach, describe associated techniques, discuss how they work and how they are being used in schools, and describe the validation work being done to enhance trust in them.
New Metrics for New Learning Ambitions
Expert Workshop
This master class is designed for teachers and school leaders in K-12, early childhood and special needs educational environments who are interested in the theory and practice of next generation assessment and reporting methods. It will be relevant to schools seeking to provide a holistic education which develops students’ 21C and future ready competencies. Traditional methods of assessing and reporting (e.g., examinations, standardised or written tests, essays) cannot generate valid or reliable estimates of student attainment in these skills. The ‘next gen’ approach has been designed using methods typical in professional education, where competence is important, not just knowledge. It is based on aggregated teacher assessments based on observations of student behaviour in complex, authentic performances in which learners demonstrate that they have integrated the complex knowledge, skills, attitude and values that make up competence. Assessment involves application of professional judgement referenced to universal competency standards. Participants in the master class will examine the structure of relevant competencies; and identify indicators of expertise in student behaviour. They will try out new techniques, tools and resources, generate standards-referenced reports for a student they know well, and benchmark associated policies and practices in their school against best-practice. This approach has grown out of a decade of R&D by Professor Milligan and her Melbourne Metrics team, working in research partnerships with first mover schools in Australia, the Philippines and the US.