Joyce Meng's Blog

23 APR 2011

Focus on Education: Dr. Andy Porter, Dean of UPenn Graduate School of Education

Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 03:50:14 PM by Joyce Meng
Day 14: Dr. Andy Porter, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education



Andy Porter has worked in higher education as a researcher and research manager for over 40 years. He is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, an elected member and the current Vice President of the National Academy of Education, and a Life Time National Associate of the National Academies. He has published over one hundred articles and book chapters, and many technical reports.

His research has focused on four interconnected interests:

- For 30 years, he has conducted studies on how teachers decide what content to teach their students.

- He leads an effort to conceptualize, develop, and disseminate an assessment of school leadership.

- He has identified characteristics of effective professional development of teachers and documented that the bulk of money spent on professional development is spent on activities lacking those characteristics.

- Psychometrics and applied statistics.

As a manager, Andy is a former Director of the Basic Skills Group of the National Institute of Education (U.S. government), Associate Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University (where he also co-directed the Institute for Research on Teaching), Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Director of the Learning Sciences Institute at Vanderbilt University. Under his leadership, the Wisconsin Center for Education Research became the largest research center on the University of Wisconsin campus with an annual budget of contracts and grants in excess of $30 million dollars per year.

Dr. Porter was appointed Dean of Penn GSE in 2007.

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