About Professor Gavin Brown

Prof. Gavin T. L. Brown is the Associate Dean Postgraduate Research and Director of the Quantitative Data Analysis and Research (Quant-DARE) unit in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is an Honorary Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the Education University of Hong Kong and an Affiliate Professor in Behaviour Measurement at Umeå University, Sweden.

After 13 years as a secondary teacher and tertiary tutor of English, Gavin spent 9 years as a standardised test developer at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and Auckland UniServices Ltd. He was the senior project manager for the Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning (asTTle) software system for the NZ Ministry of Education's contract with Prof John Hattie.

Prof. Brown is especially interested in the impact assessment has on students and teachers and how those relationships differ according to cultural and policy context factors. Based on his seminal work on teacher conceptions of assessment, Dr Brown has been actively involved in teacher studies in Australia, Catalonia, China, Cyprus, Ecuador, Egypt, Hong Kong, and India.

Prof Brown has conducted multiple studies on student self-assessment which show, despite the potential of self-assessment to deepen learning, how students distort the validity of their self-evaluations in response to inter-personal social and psychological factors. He is co-author with Dr Lois Harris the 2018 teacher volume Using self-assessment to improve student learning published by Routledge.

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