Prof. dr. Koen Aesaert
Koen Aesaert is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (KULeuven, Belgium). His expertise is situated at the intersection of educational effectiveness research and standardized testing. A first research line focuses on characteristics that may influence the validity and reliability of school performance indicators, such as sample characteristics and stability of value-added estimates over time, subjects and student cohorts. A second research line concerns the effects of teacher instruction on primary and secondary school students’ reading performance and learning gains with an emphasis on differential effects of instructional quality on reading comprehension for specific groups of students. Further, he supervises international comparative effectiveness studies such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2021 in Flanders. He is copromoter of the policy research center of test development and assessments and of the interuniversity research centre that will implement the national standardized tests in Flanders from 2023 onwards.
His keynote presentation holds the title ‘Distorted Mirrors – Bias in School Effect Estimates’.
Prof. dr. Anna-Katharina Praetorius
Anna-Katharina Praetorius is Professor for Research on Learning, Instruction, and Didactics at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). In her research, she focuses on issues around conceptualizing and measuring teaching quality, both on a national and an international level. She is co-editor of the journal Unterrichtswissenschaft, a member of the editorial boards of the journals Learning and Instruction and Educational Assessment, as well as the coordinator of the Leibniz network research on teaching quality.
Her keynote address has the title ‘Teaching Quality Research as a Balancing Act: Bringing Together Theory, Empirical Evidence, and Practice’.
Prof. dr. Amanda Datnow
Amanda Datnow is Professor and Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair in the Department of Education Studies and Associate Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California San Diego.
Her keynote presentation will focus on “Balancing Power and Voice in Research-Practice Partnerships”.