Professor David Andrich graduated in Mathematics and Education from The University of Western Australia, and received a Fulbright Award for study at The University of Chicago. His dissertation earned the Susan Colver Rosenberger prize for the best research in the Division of the Social Sciences in 1973. He returned to his appointment at The University of Western Australia, and in 1985 was appointed Professor of Education at Murdoch University in Western Australia where he held the position of Dean for two periods and held positions on many other Murdoch University Committees, including Chair of the University’s Research Centre’s Committee. Between 2007 and 2021 he was held the Chapple Professor of Education at The University of Western Australia where he is now Emeritus Professor and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney. He has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Education at The University of Oxford and a Plumer Fellow at St Anne’s College at Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Trent, Italy, The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, The University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Sorbonne in Paris.
David Andrich has held major research grants, either Discovery or Linkage with Industry Partners, or at times both, from the Australian Research Council continuously between 1985 and 2022. He was also a member of the ARC panel for assessing grants in the social sciences in the period 1998 – 2000.
In 1990, he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia for his contributions to measurement in the social sciences where his work has ranged from the philosophy of measurement, through model exposition and interpretation, to software development. He has published in Educational, Psychological, Sociological, Statistical and more recently, Physics journals.
He is the author of Rasch Models for Measurement (Sage) which has been cited some 1500 times. One of his seminal papers, A rating formulation for ordered response categories (Psychometrika, 1978) has been described as a classic in this field (with over 3250 citations). Overall, his work has been cited some 11500 times and over 4500 times in the last five years (since 2012). His current research includes the characterisation of educational growth in reading and mathematics, studying new methods for efficient test equating for university entrance, and historical and philosophical studies in measurement. In 2020 he was listed as one of the 30 top social science researchers in Australia, and the most cited researcher in the top 20 journals in the area of educational and psychological assessment. He is also an author of a text in the field published by Springer.
In addition to his academic and applied research, David Andrich has been a member of expert advisory committees at national and state levels. He has conducted commissioned reports for governments at both the national and state levels.
