Staff Profiles
Ms Suzanne Mellor
Senior Research Fellow
BA, DipEd (Melb) , BEd (LaTrobe), MEd (Monash)
Ms Suzanne Mellor, a Senior Research Fellow, joined ACER in 1990 and has worked on many policy and survey research projects, some of them evaluative of education policy and program implementation.
In 2002 she was joint-researcher for the World Bank project Promoting Social Tolerance and Cohesion Through Education, in the South Pacific. Recommendations from the three project reports were well received and resulted in policy change in the researched countries.
Project management for ACER of civics and citizenship projects has included review papers for the Curriculum Corporation: The Pedagogy of Civics and Citizenship Education and School Ethos and Citizenship, the 1998 report ‘What’s the Point?’: Political Attitudes of Victorian Year 11 Students. She was project manager of the national Australian component of the IEA Civics Education Study 1995-2002, and prepared the national report. In 2000-3 she conducted the evaluation of the Victorian Discovering Democracy Professional Development Program, resulting in Discovering Democracy in Action: Implementing the Program.
From 2003-6 she was ACER’s Project Director of the inaugural National Sample Assessment in Civics and Citizenship of Year 6 and 10 students in 600 schools in Australia, for MCEETYA. She led the research project team, managed the development of a nationally–accepted assessment domain, the development and trialling of assessment instruments and context questionnaires – all of which were negotiated with all the Australian educational jurisdictions. The conduct of the assessment in 600 schools in October 2004 was followed by the report released in December 2005. Since 2004, as ACER’s Project Director, she has directed the second cycle of the National Assessment Program-Civics and Citizenship, with testing of Yr 6 and Yr10 students in 620 schools to be conducted in October 2007.
She is currently Series Editor for ACER’s major research journal: Australian Education Review and was co-author of the first of the renewed editions: AER 47: The Case for Change: A review of contemporary research on Indigenous education outcomes, first published in 2004.
Ms Mellor has a practitioner background, having taught in secondary and tertiary institutions for over twenty years, coordinated curriculum writing for accrediting bodies, devising and providing a wide range of professional development activities for teachers, and writing text books for many levels and in a range of methodologies.