One or two paid research assistant positions of between 5 and 15 hours per week are available for UIC advanced undergraduate or graduate students in the AY 15-16 school year.
The positions will support a project studying how to capture the quality of early childhood classrooms – examining whether activities and interactions in some classrooms better support children’s school readiness than in other classrooms.
The research is focused especially on two widely-used measures of classroom quality (referred to as the ECERS-R and CLASS) which are increasingly used to measure quality in high stakes ways. That is, centers and schools’ public funding levels and professional reputations are influenced when their classrooms score above or below particular cutoffs on these measures.
UIC faculty member Rachel Gordon is the Principal Investigator of the study, which is funded by the federal Institute of Education Sciences (R305A130118). Dr. Gordon is Professor of Sociology, Faculty Fellow of the Honors College, Faculty Affiliate of the Community and Prevention Research Program in Psychology, and Associate Director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. The project is multidisciplinary and multimethod and welcomes students from diverse personal, disciplinary and methodological backgrounds.
The research assistants will support several components of the project in the coming year:
Helping to aggregate numerous regression-based estimates of the extent to which ECERS-R and CLASS scores predict children’s school readiness.
Assisting in close scrutiny of the ECERS-R and CLASS scoring procedures to help understand these regression associations.
Contributing to a database of related research studies of the ECERS-R and CLASS.
Supporting consideration of disparities in how ECERS-R and CLASS operate based on student, classroom and community characteristics.
Related activities that support the project, such as supporting the construction of summary tables and proofing of manuscripts based on the work.
These tasks require a range of skills, and the project may hire one student who encompasses the full range of skills or two students who have complementary sets of skills.
All students must be interested in gaining experience in a research project and motivated to work independently. Reliability and professionalism are essential.
The student assisting in the aggregation of regression estimates should have demonstrated competency in basic research methods and statistics (e.g., having passed with an A grade a basic methods class and a basic statistics class). Advanced statistical and software skills are not required, although students should have some demonstrated experience and facility with either a spreadsheet (e.g., Excel) or statistical (e.g., SPSS, Stata, SAS) software.
The student assisting in the close scrutiny of the ECERS-R and CLASS scoring procedures should have demonstrated competency in based research methods (having passed with an A grade a basic methods class) and, ideally, experience in similar coding projects (such as a class project that involved coding of interviews, newspaper articles, or other documents, or a qualitative methods class).
The student contributing to the database of related research studies should have experience locating and organizing journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports (e.g., using library search utilities like Google Scholar, PsycLit, SocAbstracts, or Web of Science).
Motivated students may use the research experience to contribute to co-authored project papers and/or to develop an independent study, capstone or thesis paper. The experience is well suited to advanced undergraduate students with such capstone or thesis requirements, including those seeking to build their resumes for graduate school applications. The project is similarly well suited for graduate students interested in building their curriculum vita for the job market and developing masters or dissertations projects.
To apply, send a brief statement of what interests you about the project, how many hours you would like to work, your resume or curriculum vita, and your transcript grades in methods and statistics (unofficial transcript is sufficient) to Professor Rachel Gordon at ragordon@uic.edu as soon as possible. Applications will be considered until the position is filled. Compensation will be commensurate with level of study and experience, in compliance with UIC rules and regulations.
