Ben is Head of the Department for Empirical Educational Research at the Institute for Educational Analysis (IBBW) in Germany and Extraordinary Professor at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology at the University of Tübingen.
His research focuses on teaching quality, teachers’ professional competence, and students’ individual development within classrooms. He has a special interest in measurement issues, particularly regarding the question of how to best assess teaching quality.
An important part of his work is the dissemination of his research in school practice. He works closely together with school leaders and teachers in professional development programs and workshops.
Ben is principal investigator of a research project on adaptive teaching founded by the German Bosch Foundation. He’s currently working on several projects of how to bring research-based knowledge into everyday school practice.

Benjamin Nagengast is a Full Professor of Educational Psychology at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology. His research interests include:

Quantitative methods (randomized controlled field trials,
causality, latent variable models, multi-level modelling)
Educational Effectiveness
Evaluation of interventions and educational situations
Motivation and academic self-concept

Benjamin Nagengast is Vice Director of the LEAD Graduate School & Research Network which is funded within the framework of the Excellence Initiative via the German Research Foundation. Within LEAD, he is head of the LEADing Research Center.

Edward Wright is Physics Teacher and Director of Studies at Eltham College in London. He has been involved in using evidence and evaluation techniques to assess the efficacy of various initiatives run in his College, leading to the completion of a Masters in Science Education from King’s College London. In particular, he is focused on using assessment data appropriately and meaningfully to have a positive impact on all students, not just those at the upper and lower ends of the ability or achievement scales.

Edward has spoken on the use of assessment data generated by the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring‘s computer adaptive assessment systems. As both a classroom teacher and Senior Leader, Edward brings the best available research evidence and evaluation techniques into his College; he was one of the first teachers to use the Education Endowment Foundation’s DIY Evaluation Guide. He brings to the Advisory Board a keen understanding of the daily life of schools; he ensures that we consider the practicalities of developing teachers’ use of research and evaluation techniques, grounding our work from development to implementation.

Robert is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the interrelationships of forgetting, remembering and learning in the functional architecture of how humans learn and remember, and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction, practice, and training.  He has served as President or Chair of multiple scientific organisations, including the Association for Psychological Science, and he is the recipient of multiple awards and honours, including UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Service to Psychological Science Award.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John Tomsett has been a teacher for 27 years and a headteacher for twelve. He is currently Headmaster at Huntington School, York, where the EEF-funded RISE Project (Research-leads Improving Students’ Education) is being piloted – in conjunction with EBE Director, Stuart Kime.

John has gathered a legion of followers on Twitter, and his blog, This much I know…, has proved a huge hit in the world of education as a result of its pragmatic experience from a lifetime of teaching. His first book, Love Over Fear – creating a culture for truly great teaching, is available in print and as an ebook, and John is also a regular contributor to the TES.

He co-founded The Headteachers’ Roundtable think-tank and is a popular speaker on school leadership. He is a strong advocate of evidence-informed teaching, and brings practical knowledge from the coalface of school leadership to the Advisory Board. He is determined to remain a classroom teacher, despite the demands of headship, and believes that developing truly great teaching is the primary responsibility of all headteachers.

John Hattie taught in a middle and high school, then completed his PhD in measurement and statistics at OISE (U Toronto), and joined academia.  He was taught at New England, Western Australia, North Carolina, Auckland, and now is Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne.  He also is Chair of the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leaders, which is a Federal Government owned body aimed at improving the quality of teachers, school leaders, and initial teacher education across Australia.

His areas of interest are measurement models and their applications to educational problems, and models of teaching and learning.  He has published and presented over 1000 papers and supervised 200 theses students, and 50 books – including 18 on Visible Learning.  Hence his interest in this Evidence Centre to ensure evidence remains a contested notion, that evidence is robust but more important robustly interpreted and implemented in our schools and classes.

Morgan is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. He researches the design, implementation, and effects of standards, assessment, and accountability policies.

Morgan is a co-investigator on the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning, a five-year project to study the implementation and effects of new “college- and career-ready standards” in the U.S. In that work, he is leading the development of survey measures of teachers’ implementation of new standards. He also has projects funded by the WT Grant Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study the adoption, use, and effects of textbooks in the core academic subjects.

He currently serves as a co-editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and on the editorial boards of Educational Researcher and AERA Open. In 2017, he was awarded the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association.

Paula is Director of the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP), a recently launched member organization aiming to develop, support, and connect research-practice partnerships in education. NNERPP is housed at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Prior to joining NNERPP, Paula was a post-doctoral fellow at the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and The Murphy Institute, both at Tulane University. Her research focus while at Tulane broadly centered on the supply side of schools, where she examined school differentiation and the unintended consequences of school or district level policies. More recently, she has turned her attention to better understanding the process of research use and the conditions leading to evidence-based decision making. Paula has bachelor’s degrees in music and business from Florida State University and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Houston.

Dylan Wiliam is Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London.

After a first degree in mathematics and physics, and one year teaching in a private school, he taught in inner-city schools in London for seven years.

In 1984 he joined Chelsea College, University of London, which later merged with King’s College London. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Dean of the School of Education at King’s, and from 2001 to 2003, Assistant Principal of the College. In 2003 he moved to the USA, as Senior Research Director at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. From 2006 to 2010 he was Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, University of London.

Over the last 15 years, his academic work has focused on the use of assessment to support learning (sometimes called formative assessment). He now works with groups of teachers all over the world on developing formative assessment practices.

Heather is a Professor in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her primary work focuses on teacher and teaching quality, and the effects of policies aimed at improving both. She is also known for developing instruments for measuring teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and the mathematical quality of instruction (MQI) within classrooms.

Hill is a co-investigator on the National Center for Research on Policy and Practice, a U.S.-based project dedicated to investigating how research is used in school districts’  instructional decision-making. She co-directed the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness and was also principal investigator of a five-year study examining the effects of Marilyn Burns Math Solutions professional development on teaching and learning. Her other interests include knowledge use within the public sector and the role that language plays in the implementation of public policy.

She has served as section chairs for the American Educational Research Association and Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness conferences, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Research in Mathematics Education and the American Educational Research Journal. She is the coauthor, with David K. Cohen, of Learning policy: When state education reform works (Yale Press, 2001).

Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel is an expert in applying findings from cognitive science to education and an enthusiastic science communicator. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Mannheim and pursued postdoc positions at York University in Toronto and the Center for Integrative Research in Cognition, Learning, and Education (CIRCLE) at Washington University in St. Louis. She was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Dundee for four years before starting as a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Glasgow in January 2020.

Her expertise focuses on learning and memory phenomena that allow implementation to educational settings to offer teachers and students a wide range of strategies that promote long-term retention. Carolina engages heavily in scholarly outreach and science communication; she is a member of the Learning Scientists and founded the Teaching Innovation & Learning Enhancement (TILE) network. TILE brings different disciplines and sectors together to discuss how to overcome prevailing issues in education with research-based approaches.

Janice began her career in a Special Measures all-boys school in Manchester and was given the challenge of introducing Drama across the curriculum. Through her work over eight years she led the Performing Arts Department and ensured that Drama was fully embedded in the school with excellent results. She learnt there the importance of trusting and investing in staff and this has stayed with her through 9 years as a Curriculum Deputy in two schools before becoming Head Teacher at Falinge Park High School, Rochdale in 2015.

Janice is Chair of the NW1 Maths Hub with NCETM, represents Secondary Heads on Complex Safeguarding Matters and Safeguarding boards, and is a Local Leader of Education.