Professor Barry McGaw AO

Emeritus Professor Barry McGaw AO FASSA

BSc, BEd (Qld), MEd, PhD (Illinois), FACE, FAPS

Discipline: Education

Year Elected: 1984

When I was elected as a Fellow in 1984, I was in my ninth year as Professor of Education at Murdoch University and was Executive Director-elect of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) in which role I commenced in January 1985. The foundation Executive Director of ACER, Ken Cunningham, had served in that role from 1930 to 1955 and had a key role in the establishment of the precursor body to ASSA. I was later honoured to deliver the Academy’s Cunningham Lecture in 2008.

Serendipity has played a role in some key parts of my career. In 1970, when I was a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Professor Ledyard Tucker arranged a summer fellowship for me at Educational Testing Service and armed me with a box of computer cards with data that I could analyse with a new technique developed and yet to be published by Karl Jöreskog. When Karl published the model, Simultaneous Factor Analysis in Several Populations (SIFASP), in Psychometrica he and I published its first application in the British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology. I worked with him again at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in 1979 when I was on sabbatical leave, that time using his Linear Structural Relations (LISREL) model to analyse a new data set with which I was working.

In 1971, I became the first graduate student to serve on Council of the American Educational Research Association and there met Gene Glass who was one of the Divisional Vice-Presidents. In his Presidential Address at the Associations 1976 annual conference, he introduced meta-analysis as a quantitative method for synthesizing the results of multiple quantitative studies. I was President of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in that year and brought Gene to Australia as a keynote speaker at our conference. In 1979, I spent part of a sabbatical leave with him at the University of Colorado, the most important consequence being that he, I and Marylee Smith published Meta-analysis in social research in 1981.

Fellowship in ASSA has widened my disciplinary perspective beyond that of quantitative research in education and psychology though my own work remained close to that tradition through work at ACER and later at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). I drew on OECD data and analyses for my contribution to ASSA’s Jubilee Symposium and its publication, The Social Future of Australia.

My roles at ACER and OECD involved me much more in education and social policy than in personal research but my policy work has been informed by our quantitative work in the two organisations.

These days I enjoy the New Fellows’ Presentations which showcase the breadth and depth of contemporary social science research in Australia.