The Stellenbosch University Unit for International Credentialling is situated within the Africa Centre for Scholarship at Stellenbosch University International. The Unit works in conjunction with and with the support of several Stellenbosch University divisions such as the Finance Department, the Human Resources Department and the office of the Rectorate. The core team of the Unit consist of a dedicated group that manages and coordinates with the different teams.
Prof. Sarah Howie
Director: SU-UIC
Sarah Howie is the Founding Director at the Africa Centre for Scholarship as well as the Director of the SU-UIC. She studied at the universities of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Witwatersrand (Masters) and her PhD was obtained at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Her field of expertise lies in large-scale international education assessment research as well as research methodology.
She has considerable experience in assessment as well as education research as she was also the founding Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Pretoria for 17 years. There more than 75 research and development projects in evaluation and assessment were conducted as well as postgraduate research and publications associated with large scale assessment (including TIMSS, PIRLS, SACMEQ and PISA). Amongst others, she was the Deputy-Chair of the Board of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) (2015-2020) and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. She has been a member of the Umalusi Assessment and Standards Committee (previously also the Statistics Committee) for over a decade. She is a member of the Admissions Committee for Universities South Africa (USAf). She has also consulted for the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF and the OECD and conducted training internationally.
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She has supervised students and trained researchers, practitioners in assessment methods. She trained and advised policymakers and professionals from assessment bodies, national and provincial departments of education in areas related to assessment and examinations. She has supervised to completion about 40 postgraduate students at Masters’ and Doctoral levels with most being doctoral students. She has led more than 80 research projects with several being multi-disciplinary, large-scale and international projects.
Between 1997-2017, she served as the national coordinator of a number of international comparative assessment studies in education for the international Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) including TIMSS, SITES & PIRLS. She also served on international committees for the IEA and the Organisation for Economic and Community Development (OECD) to design and implement international assessment studies (Progress in International Reading Achievement Studies (PIRLS) and Programme for Student Assessment (PISA)) and education research (SITES, TALIS). She is currently a member of the IEAs Publication Committee reviewing all publications on the assessment studies and research outputs from the IEA. She is also a member of the American Education Research Association, European Association for Educational Research and a member of the International Association for Educational Assessment.
She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and serves on a number of national and international editorial boards including the Oxford Review of Education. Amongst a number of awards, she won the National Science and Technology Forum’s prestigious prize for Most Innovative Research 2003 and was a finalist in the Women in Science and Woman of the Year.
Ms. Mia Andersen
Coordinator: SU-UIC
Mia is the coordinator of the Stellenbosch University Unit for International Credentialling (SU-UIC), a unit within the ACS. She is responsible amongst others for the coordination and development of structures and processes of the SU-UIC. Mia has a BCom honours degree in Human Resource Management, in addition to a number of years of legal training, from Stellenbosch University. She has been working at SU International from 2017 where she started within the Global Education Centre before moving to the SU-UIC in 2020.
Email: mandersen@sun.ac.za
Tel: +27 21 808 9057