Staff profile

Affiliate of the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education

Emeritus Professor in the School of Education

Fellow of the British Academy

Academician: Academy of Social Sciences

Fellow in the Durham Research Methods Centre

Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

After taking a degree from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences Peter Tymms taught in a wide variety of schools from Central Africa to the north-east of England before starting an academic career.

He was “Lecturer in Performance Indicators” at Moray House, Edinburgh before moving to Newcastle University and then to Durham University where he is presently Professor of Education.He led the start of the UK Rasch User Group started the PIPS project

His main research interests include monitoring, assessment, performance indicators, ADHD, reading and research methodology. The PIPS project, which is designed to monitor the affective and cognitive progress of children through primary schools starting with a computer adaptive on-entry baseline assessment. Peter Tymms was Director of the CEM Centre until 2011 when he took over as Head of Department and Chair of the Board of Studies in the School of Education. At present he is devoting his time to setting up an international project designed to study children starting school around the world. The project is known as iPIPS .

Completed Supervisions

The Binormal Hypothesis of Specific Learning Disabilities

Factors Underlying Students' Conceptions of Deep Time: An Exploratory Study

An Item Response Theory Approach to the Maintenance of
Standards in Public Examinations in England

Building Schools of Character: The Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of a School-Based Character Education Programme Designed to Promote Cooperative Learning and Reduce Anti-Social Behaviour

Classroom management approaches of primary teachers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Descriptions and the development of curriculum and instruction with a focus on Islamic education teachers.

An exploration of the effects of group summative assessment marking on higher education students’ overall marks.

Developing, Testing and Interpreting a Cross Age Peer Tutoring Intervention for Mathematics: Social Interdependence,Systematic Reviews and an Empirical Study.

The theoretical and practical value of the OECD policy advice for education.

Teachers’ perceptions on the effectiveness of the Oxford Online Placement Test at King Abdulaziz University

Information for prospective doctoral research student supervisions

Professor Tymms is semi-retired and is not taking on new students

• Monitoring
• Assessment & testing
• Educational standards
• Primary schools
• ADHD

• Fellow of the British Academy:
• Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University:
• Academician: Academy of Social Sciences
• Member: Education Advisory Group Education Endowment Foundation
• Winner: Excellence in Knowledge Transfer Award Durham University (joint: 2015)
• Originator: Online Educational Research Journal
• Inaugural Member: Sutton Trust's Education Advisory Group