Staff Directory

Ms Prue Anderson

Position:

Senior Research Fellow  

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Division:

Assessment and Reporting: Humanities and Social Sciences 

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Location:

Melbourne 

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Qualifications:

BA, MEdSt Monash, DipEd La T

 

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Ms Prue Anderson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research in the Assessment and Reporting research program.

She joined the developmental assessment team in 1999, within which she was responsible for the development of a wide range of assessment materials for system level testing programs, mapping assessments against curriculum outcome statements and frameworks.

Ms Anderson is currently working with the Education Department in PNG to develop a standards monitoring program for literacy and mathematics for students in years 3, 5 and 8. She was involved in extensive consultation with local PNG experts to ensure the cultural appropriateness and relevance of the assessment materials and to also develop background questionnaires and a survey of students' attitudes and values. Key learning objectives have been determined through analysis of curriculum documents, textbooks and workshops with curriculum consultants.

Prue has also developed assessment instruments to measure inter-personal and intra-personal knowledge, skills and understandings for WA Social Outcomes of Schooling, refining cognitive domains and developing a theoretical framework to describe development. She recently worked on the development of instruments to assess understanding of empathy and also continuing to refine the test construct and definition of empathy.

All Prue's work in assessment has included the development, administration and analysis of trial materials, and the selection and layout of final forms and production of a range of reports for individuals, teachers, schools and systems. She has developed multiple choice, short answer and open-ended items with accompanying marking guides. She has also developed assessment rubrics for performances and essays. She has overseen the literacy development of reading assessment items for ACER's International Student Assessment (ISA) including the supervision of new staff. This work is aligned with the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

For the last two years she was the project director for ACER's Literacy and Numeracy National Assessment (LANNA), which has 15,000 candidates across Australia in Years 3, 5 and 7. This role has required supervision of assessment materials, reporting components and administration of the test as well as liaison with client stakeholders. She has developed reading assessment materials for a number of large scale state wide tests including reading materials for Years 3, 5, 7 and 10 in WA Monitoring Standards in Education and assessment materials for Reading, Speaking, Listening, Viewing and Writing for Years 3 and 5 in the ACT Testing Program. All these projects have been collaborative exercises with the stakeholders and Prue has provided on-going support and advice as well as seeking feedback either by email, via teleconferences or through face-to-face meetings.

Her ongoing involvement in the Longitudinal Literacy and Numeracy Study (LLANS) has included development of assessment materials in both numeracy and literacy for students in their second and third years of school. She is also working on the collaborative development of descriptive scales of literacy and numeracy achievement and writing a report of the LLANS findings for the first three years of school.

Prue has worked with a number of international groups advising them on aspects of assessment. She has facilitated a workshop on the use of assessment data for a Filipino group as part of the Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao (BEAM) program and conducted a workshop on developmental assessment for the Sri Lankan Secondary Education Modernisation Project Fellowship Program. She has also given a presentation about the challenges of assessing non-academic outcomes to Hong Kong Curriculum Development officers.

Prue has successfully managed a number of projects requiring extensive consultation with clients and management of internal staff. Her recent research work investigating links between student learning outcomes and teacher professional development required ongoing liaison with schools and in depth interviews with many different school personnel. Her report has been commended for its analytic insight. She has also directed a project on the evaluation of a school entry assessment kit for the New Zealand Ministry of Education conducting interviews with a wide range of people associated with the development and use of the kit and co-ordinating the production of a final report.

She taught for nine years in a range of alternative and mainstream primary schools and for four years at a tertiary level in education prior to joining ACER.

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