Rate My Professor Joshua McGrane

Associate Professor Joshua McGrane serves as Deputy Director of the Assessment and Evaluation Research Centre (AERC) and Associate Professor of Measurement Analytics in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne. He earned his PhD in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Sydney in 2009, receiving the Tasman Lovell Medallion for the best doctoral dissertation submitted in Psychology that year, along with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from the same university. His professional career encompasses significant roles such as former Deputy Director of the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and Psychometrician at the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation within the New South Wales Department of Education. Additionally, he holds a position as Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

McGrane's research specializations lie in the philosophical, empirical, and statistical dimensions of psychometrics and educational assessment. His current projects include developing a meta-framework for measurement across the physical and social sciences, integrating psychometric and AI modeling to predict and explain bias in educational assessments, evaluating critical thinking skills among secondary students internationally, and creating language assessments for understudied languages. Key publications feature 'The impact of peer assessment on academic performance: A meta-analysis of control group studies' in Educational Psychology Review (2020, 724 citations), 'The Bipolarity of Attitudes: Unfolding the Implications of Ambivalence' (2019), and recent works on large language models grading open-response questions and generative AI in teacher education. With over 2300 citations on Google Scholar, his contributions have notably influenced the field. He acts as Executive Editor for Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice and has delivered keynote addresses, including on AI-driven educational assessment at the AEA-Europe conference in 2024.