Dr Hamish Coates

Dr Hamish Coates is a Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research, appointed in February 2006 to lead ACER's research on higher education. He has designed and led a large number of projects that have influenced research, policy and practice.

Dr Coates' research and publications focus on the definition, measurement and evaluation of educational processes, contexts and outcomes. Active interests include student learning and engagement, higher education policy, large-scale educational evaluation, university pedagogy and leadership, online and distributed education, quality assurance systems, and assessment methodology.

Dr Coates joined ACER from his position of Senior Research Officer at Graduate Careers Australia where he designed and led a major project to redesign all aspects of Australia's national graduate census. Dr Coates worked for several years at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education and the Assessment Research Centre at the University Melbourne. He has worked with a number of national advisory groups, is a member of the international methods group for the Changing Academic Profession survey, and has held visiting fellowships at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan, and at UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP).

Hamish has taught statistics, psychology and research methods for several years. He currently supervises doctoral students and teaches the subject Large-scale Survey Research as part of the Masters of Assessment and Evaluation at the University of Melbourne.