Professor Barry McGaw is half-time Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne where he is Executive Director of the Cisco-Intel-Microsoft Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project. He is Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.
Prior to returning to Australia at the end of 2005, he was Director for Education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He had earlier been Executive Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), Professor of Education at Murdoch University, Head of the Research and Curriculum Branch in the Queensland Department of Education and originally a science teacher in Queensland secondary schools.

Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA)
Fellow of the Australian College of Education (FACE)
Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society (FAPSS)
Fellow of the International Academy of Education (FIAE)

BSc, The University of Queensland
EdM, University of Illinois
PhD, University of Illinois

Recent publications:
McGaw, B. (2008) How good is Australian school education? In S. Marginson & R. James (Eds.) Education, science and public policy: ideas for an education revolution. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, pp.53-77.
McGaw, B. (2008) The role or quality and equity in education. In R.L. DeHaan & K.M.V. Narayan (Eds.) Education for innovation: implications for India, China and America. Rotterdam & Taipei: Sense Publishers, pp.249-264.
McGaw, B. (2008) Building human and social capital in communities through education. In L. Doyle, D. Adams & P Welsh (Eds.) Building Stronger Communities: Connecting research, policy and practice. National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Leicester), pp.67-81.
McGaw, B. (2008) ‘Education and social connectedness’, Debate, Vol.2, pp 16-19.
McGaw, B. (2008) ‘Further reflections’, Assessment in Education, Vol.15(3), pp.279-282.
McGaw, B. (2008) ‘Science good, maths holding, reading declining’, EQ Australia, Autumn, pp.6-7.
McGaw, B. (2008) ‘The role of the OECD in international comparative studies of achievement’, Assessment in Education, Vol.15(3), pp.223-243.
McGaw, B. (2006) Improving the effectiveness, efficiency and equity of education. In P.W. Hughes (Ed.) Secondary education at the crossroads. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, pp.223-244.
Plomp, T., Howie, S., & McGaw, B. (2002). International studies of educational achievements. In T. Kellaghan & D. Stufflebeam (Eds) International handbook of educational evaluation. Boston: Kluwer, pp.951-978.

Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills [www.atc21s.org] : the aim of this project is to develop assessments of the skills needed to 'work in teams and use a variety of resources - social, digital, physical - unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, to solve complex, ill-structured problems, or to create ideas, products, and services'. There are working groups led by colleagues in Berkeley and Washington universities and WestEd in the US and the University of Szeged in Hungary. The University of Melbourne's project partners are Cisco, Intel and Microsoft.