Open Postdoctoral position, faculty mentor Jelena Obradovic

Dr. Jelena Obradović is seeking a postdoctoral scholar to join her research group in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. We encourage applications from individuals from a broad diversity of PhD-granting institutions, backgrounds, and life experiences who would strengthen and diversify our community of scholars. 

The MAGIC Project (Measuring Acquisition & Growth of Inquiry & Curiosity) is a sponsored research initiative at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. Professor Jelena Obradović and her team at the SPARK (Stanford Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids) Lab have designed a battery of novel, tablet-based assessments of young learners’ curiosity, creativity, initiative, problem-solving, and scientific inquiry, which are skills that create a strong foundation for lifelong learning. The postdoctoral scholar will join a research team focused on: (1) using novel methods to create metrics based on task interaction data and verbal responses from children in pre-K through grade 2; (2) validating the measures in real-world educational settings with children from diverse language, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds; and (3) disseminating research results and the assessments themselves to the broader community of education researchers and practitioners. 

Based on their expertise, the postdoctoral fellow will participate in the evaluation and validation of new performance-based assessments of foundational learning skills and contribute to scoring, analyzing, and interpreting data from these assessments. In addition to applying mainstream quantitative research methods used to validate assessments across groups (e.g., measurement invariance/differential item functioning) to ensure that assessments are unbiased with respect to racial/ethnic background and language, a major focus for this position is to significantly extend our existing team’s capabilities for data scoring and analysis (e.g., with expertise in natural language processing, machine learning, or computational modeling). Finally, the fellow will contribute to our team’s efforts to promote open science through sharing data, documentation, and our assessment tools with researchers and educators, which will include supporting the creation of a data repository and analyzing data across multiple labs in the MAGIC research network. This position offers an excellent opportunity to further analytical and writing skills and to publish scientific papers.