Emeritus Professor Patrick Griffin held the Chair of Education (Assessment), the Associate Dean and founding Director of the Assessment Research Centre at the
Melbourne Graduate School of Education for more than 25 years. Professor Griffin was awarded the
John Smythe medal for research in profiling literacy development in which he pioneered the development of criterion referenced, competency based developmental progressions. He currently consults on behalf of IBE-UNESCO to develop a competency based curriculum framework for twentieth century education.
During the mid-1980s, as a head of research and measurement in the
Victorian State Ministry of Education, he focused on developmental approaches to the assessment of literacy and numeracy for monitoring and accountability purposes. The competency based progressions became the basis of the National Curriculum in Australia in the 1990s. The process was published in the Australian Journal of Education 1990, and it has been adopted, adapted or modified wherever developmental progressions, (described Scales/ Construct maps) are used.
He was a psychometric consultant for the UNESCO project Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) and was awarded, in 2005, a UNESCO Research Medal by the Assembly of Ministers of Education from Southern African nations.
Professor Griffin has also been a
World Bank consultant in Vietnam and China, leading national and international teams in studies of literacy and numeracy assessment. He developed a system of teacher assessment signed into law by the Vietnam Government and applied to more than 380,000 teachers. He led the development of leadership frameworks for school principals and instructional development models for classroom teachers for the Australia Institute of Teaching and School Leadership. His work continues to focus on item response modelling applications in interpretive frameworks for criterion referenced assessment and its application to competency and performance assessment with a formative assessment focus.
He was the executive director of the Assessment and Teaching of 21
st Century Skills Project is the lead editor of the ATC21S series. Volume 1 was co-edited with McGaw and Care (editors) (2012). Volume 2 was published in 2014. Volumes 3, a research volume, is in preparation. In 2014 his work in linking assessment to teaching was published as ‘Assessment for Teaching’ by
Cambridge University Press.
Emeritus Professor Griffin is one of six Australians Fellows of the International Academy of Education.
