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Biography:

Dr. Willms is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Director of the Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Human Development at the University of New Brunswick. He is a Member of the Human Development Program and a Research Fellow with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He holds a Master's degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University. Doug has worked on a number of research projects pertaining to the assessment of school performance in Canada, the US, Scotland, Israel, and Thailand. He has investigated the effectiveness of various school-related evaluation systems both in Canada and the UK, and has published extensively on the accountability of schooling systems and the assessment of school effects and national reforms. Dr. Willms has also delivered many workshops in leadership and school reform for school principals in Russia the Ukraine and Estonia, and provided an extensive workshop on monitoring performance to Ministry of Education researchers in Singapore. Doug's research has entailed extensive analysis of large-scale database analysis and the interpretation and reporting of findings to administrators and policy-makers. He has collaborated with organizations like the OECD, Statistics Canada, and Human Resources Development Canada. He serves on the expert advisory group for the planning, implementation, and data analysis of Canada's National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth, and the Youth-in-Transition Survey. He has also trained statisticians and economists at Statistics Canada on the use of hierarchical linear modeling. Dr. Willms has conducted workshops for educational researchers in Sweden on hierarchical linear models in educational research, and provided similar training to new researchers in Canada and the US.