Doctoral 2010 - Post-Doctoral Research Associate Department of Social Science & Policy Studies Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Post-Doctoral Research Associate
Department of Social Science & Policy Studies
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Position Description: Full time position available in educational
data mining/science inquiry/motivation research, working with
Dr. Janice Gobert and Dr. Ryan Baker. Researcher will study how the
relationship between student individual differences and learning is
mediated by disengaged behaviors within the Science Assistments
project, an intelligent tutoring system for middle school students'
inquiry in science. WPI currently provides and supports this system
for middle schools in the Central Massachusetts area and is developing
and implementing assessments for Physics, Chemistry, Biology and
Geoscience.
Information about the project team can be found at
http://users.wpi.edu/~sci_assistments

Principal duties and responsibilities:
Conduct field observations of student disengagement
Use educational data mining methods to develop detectors of disengaged
behaviors
Programmatically analyze and distill log files of student internaction
Utilize questionnaire measures of student individiual differences
Assist in other types of data collectioin and analysis
Assist in developing project documents and papers
Assist in developing and maintaining relationships with teachers and
school administrators
Other duties as assigned

Requirements: A graduate degree in Learning Sciences, Computer
Science, Education, Science Education, Mathematics or related area,
with research background in educational data mining, web usage mining
or log analysis, motivation, and/or disengagement

Excellent people skills are essential in order to interact with
project team consisting of software engineers, teachers, graduate
students and school administrators

Excellent time management skills

Ability to work in Massachusetts schools

* Initial length of appointment is 2 years. May be extended upon
successful performance and availability of funding for a third year.

To enrich education through diversity, WPI is an affirmative action,
equal opportunity employer.

A Member of the Colleges of Worcester Consortium

To apply, go to WPI's website
https://wpi.peopleadmin.com/
and search for Faculty/Research positions.

Please contact Janice Gobert, jgobert-AT-wpi.edu
with any questions.