J. Douglas Willms
J. Douglas Willms is the Founder and President of The Learning Bar Inc. He is a member of the US National Academy of Education, Past-President of the International Academy of Education and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. From 1995 to 2018, Willms was Professor of Education at the University of New Brunswick, where for eight years he held the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Chair in Human Development and for fourteen years held the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Literacy and Human Development. Willms graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada  in 1972 with a B.Eng. in Engineering Physics, and after a brief career as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces he pursued a career in education. He received a teaching certificate in Special Education (1975) and an M.A. in Educational Psychology (1978) from the University of British Columbia. He subsequently taught at the elementary, secondary and university levels before pursuing further graduate training at Stanford University, where he received an M.Sc. in Statistics (1980), an Educational Specialist degree in Program Evaluation (1981), and a Ph.D. in Education (1983). From 1983 to 1995 he held various positions at the University  of Edinburgh, where he became an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in 1988, and at the University of British Columbia where he became Professor in 1993. Throughout his career, Willms has been a regular consultant with the World Bank, OECD, UNESCO, Inter-American Development Bank and Statistics Canada. In 2004, Willms co-founded The Learning Bar Inc., with the aim of bringing his research on children's development and assessment into widespread practice. The company employs over 70 staff in its Canadian and Australian offices, providing research and assessment services in several countries worldwide. The company's flagship products are the  Early Years Evaluation, Confident Learners, and the OurSCHOOL / Tell Them From Me suite of school surveys. Research. Willms's research contributions span four decades with publications in the areas of child development, children's health, youth literacy, the accountability of schooling systems and the assessment of national reforms. His recent research included the development of an assessment framework called Educational Prosperity, which sets out a small, coherent set of metrics for assessing child and youth development from conception to late adolescence. The framework was adopted by the OECD for its study, PISA for Development and is now being used in  nine countries.