NEQMAP Steering Group

The Steering Group will consist of approximately five or seven (5 or 7) members representing the various sub-regions of the Asia-Pacific (including Central Asia, North-East Asia, South-East Asia, South-West Asia and the Pacific). The Steering Group should be made up of recognized experts in the area of educational quality with experience in leading international/regional/national assessment programmes. More details can be found in the Terms of Reference of the Steering Group.

The NEQMAP Streering Group Members:

 Ho Sui Chu Esther (Dr)
 Director of Hong Kong Centre for International Student Assessment and Project  Manager of HKPISA

 Esther was consultant for Macau-PISA in 2003, China-PISA Trail Study in 2006,  Shanghai-PISA in 2009 and will be supporting China-PISA in 2015. A Fulbright  scholar  at Pennsylvania State University (2004) and John Hopkins University (2010),  she is  also a Research Associate of the project Education and Development in South  China, a teaching consultant of the World Bank in the District Primary Educational Programme, India, and Principal Investigator of Home School Collaboration Project.

Her research interests include: parental involvement in children's education, home school community collaboration, school effectiveness and school reform, decentralization and school-based management, research methodology in education and multilevel analysis in educational research.

 Ivan Nikitin (Mr)
 Executive Secretary of the Eurasian Association for Educational Assessment

 Ivan additionally serves as Program Director of the Center for International Cooperation  in Educational Development (Russia). He has participated in educational projects on  international comparative analysis, organizational and curricular development of  universities. He is an author of research papers on universities management and ranking, education financing and learning technologies issued by Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).

In 2009-2011 Ivan Nikitin managed the projects implemented by RANEPA within Russian Federal Education Development Program. As a member of several RANEPA working groups he participated in state initiatives on education policy development, including preparing of Russian Education Development Strategy until 2015.

 Jimin Cho (Dr)
 Vice President of the Division of Global Education at the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation

 Jimin started her professional career with KICE in 2002, taking charge of the National Assessment of Educational Achievement (NAEA). She also worked in the division for College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) as the head of Department of Planning and Analysis.

Before her current position, she headed the Department of International Comparative Studies of Student Achievement where she coordinated the PISA and TIMSS projects. Her major experience has been in developing the framework for student assessments and particularly in scoring and reporting in-depth analyses of various major assessments in the Republic of Korea.

 Michelle Belisle (Dr)
Director of the Educational Quality and Assessment Programme of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community  

 Educational Quality and Assessment Programme (EQAP), formerly the South Pacific Board for Educational Assessment or SPBEA, was  established in 1980 with a mandate to assist in regional and national educational  assessment needs of its Pacific country members. Over time the emphasis of EQAP work has shifted from a pragmatic need for assessment, to assessment as a supporting and promoting agent for the improvement in the quality of education and in recent years EQAP has become a part of SPC.

Michelle joined EQAP in April 2015, after serving as the Director of Assessment in the Saskatchewan MInistry of Education in Canada. Michelle has been a lecturer in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of Regina in the areas of classroom assessment and leadership and assessment. She holds PhD in Education from the University of Regina in Canada, a MAEd in Curriculum and Technology from the University of Phoenix and a BEd in Secondary Mathematics from the University of Regina.

Suman Bhattacharjea (Dr)
Director of Research at ASER Centre 

 Suman has extensive experience in the fields of education, gender, and women's  rights. She has worked with government, private, non government and international  organizations in several countries, including India, the United States, Pakistan and  Mexico. She has taught courses on research design, gender and education and has  authored or coauthored numerous articles and books in these areas.

Suman earned an undergraduate degree in Economics with Honors from Delhi University, and Masters and Doctoral degrees in Education from Harvard University.

 Ursula Schwantner (Dr)
 Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research 

 Ursula Schwantner is a Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational  Research (ACER), Centre for Global Education Monitoring (ACER-GEM). ACER-GEM  supports countries and education systems in developing and implementing robust  learning assessments, and in efficiently using the educational data to inform education  policy and practice.

Ursula manages ACER-GEM’s engagement with the NEQMAP through knowledge sharing, capacity development and research. She also leads the cooperation with the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) network which joins citizen-led assessments in fourteen countries in Africa, Asia and North America. Ursula also works with individual citizen-led assessments to design and implement technical support.

As part of ACER-GEM’s technical partnership with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Ursula manages the Centre’s contribution in developing tools and guidelines to support monitoring of learning outcomes in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on education.

Ursula has 15 years’ experience as an educational researcher, specialising in large scale assessments. Prior to joining ACER in 2014, she was the National Project Manager for OECD/PISA in Austria, and has conducted research on PISA, IEA/PIRLS and TIMSS.

 Nordin Abd Razak (Dr)
 Professor of the School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia

 His research interests include Measurement and Scale Development, Educational  Assessment and Evaluation, International Large-scale Assessment [e.g. TIMSS and  PISA], and Psychological Testing His expertise includes multivariate and multilevel  analysis and Rasch Measurement Model using various statistical software such as  SPSS, HLM, AMOS, SMARTPLS, WINSTEPS, JMetrik and RUMM (for Rasch  Measurement Analysis), Test Analysis Program (TAP) and open source such as R.

Nordin is currently involved in research projects that focuses on quality of teacher work-life, positive education/positive institution, evaluation and assessment. He also conducts secondary data analysis for International large scale assessment. He is a consultant for various divisions in the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Higher Education in Malaysia. With his expertise, he has conducted extensive research and training at the National and International levels in the area of Assessment and PISA Item Development and Data Analysis.