Ian Cameron Scholarship in Educational Measurement & Evaluation
Ian Cameron spent 60 years in the BC education system, first as a student and then as a teacher, librarian, administrator, Ministry of Education manager and finally as a teacher in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria.
He served as what would be called the "utility infielder" in baseball parlance in the Faculty of Education. Between 1988 and 2010, he taught 13 different courses to some 6000 students in the areas of program evaluation, language arts, librarianship, educational technology, sociology and measurement.
In the last ten years of his career, most of his teaching was in assessment and evaluation, at both elementary and secondary levels. Dr. Cameron firmly believes that measuring student achievement should be based on measurable outcomes and formal tests or assignments, rather than, "I know my students."
Even so, Dr. Cameron still took the time to know his students. He was enthusiastic about education, teaching and seeing his students succeed. He writes, in a Times Colonist article dated June 5, 2014, “My first assignment involved a Grade 7 class with 36 students. I wouldn’t have traded any of those kids for anything. Including Nils, who had an IQ of 80 and came in before school for 20 minutes every day for help with his reading, so he could join his dad as a carpenter. Four years later, when Nils was taking shop classes at Burnaby Central, he helped me with a kitchen reno. Took him a bit longer to add quarters, eighths and 16ths than it took me. But he could cut to a 16th, which was more than I could do.”
An active voice about classroom issues, Dr. Cameron offered possible solutions to problems. In the same article he writes, “The mistake everyone made was lumping all kids with special needs — hearing, visually and physically impaired, mentally handicapped, Down syndrome and severe behaviour problems — together under that one label. And now they are stuck with it, teachers and government alike. No one wants to admit the real difficulty: disruptive kids.”
“My solution is differentiated classes,” he offers and then describes how each class would look. “Teachers would choose which class they want, and if there weren’t enough volunteers for any category, assignments would be made on a rota basis, but I suspect most spots would be filled by volunteers.”
Dr. Cameron’s efforts to improve the classroom experience for both teachers and students will continue far beyond his own efforts. He decided to leave a bequest by establishing an endowment fund in the form of the Ian Cameron Scholarship in Educational Measurement & Evaluation (the "Scholarship").
The Scholarship is awarded to a graduate student with outstanding academic achievement in the area of educational measurement and evaluation. The recipient will be enrolled in a graduate program in educational psychology and conducting thesis or dissertation research in the field of educational measurement, assessment and evaluation. The scholarship will be granted to a student whose thesis or dissertation investigates more efficient ways of measuring student achievement and who has the highest grade point average.