Steve Humphry is an expert in Educational Assessment, Measurement and Evaluation. He won a position with UWA in 2006 and has held substantial Australian Research Council Linkage grants continuously from 2008 to the present. He has extensive experience in the NAPLAN and WALNA large-scale testing programs. His research has focused increasingly on developing novel approaches that allow classroom teachers to reliably assess students in areas not amenable to large-scale testing.

In Industry work, between 2011 and 2013, he led the Central Analysis of Data project for NAPLAN, on which a team of psychometricians establish NAPLAN literacy and numeracy scales that form the basis for reporting on performance at the Australian, state and territory, school and individual student levels. Before joining the University of Western Australia, he also worked for a number of years as the Psychometrician for the Western Australian Department of Education’s large-scale assessment program.

Through research, Dr Humphry has published a number of papers outlining theoretical and technical advancements in educational measurement designed to improve the comparability of results from different tests, such as those administered in successive calendar years. He has also overseen the development of statistical software used to analyse student results as well as software for reporting results. He conducted research on the development of marking rubrics that formed the basis of the NAPLAN Writing marking rubric. His research led to commercial application in Brightpath Assessments, which is used by several hundred schools across Australia.