Position Available
One open-rank, tenure-track position in Educational Psychology co-funded by the Institute for CyberScience (ICS).
Beginning
Fall Semester 2020.
Details
The Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education in the College of Education and the Institute of CyberScience at The Pennsylvania State University invite applications for an open rank, tenure-track position with primary responsibilities in teaching and research in the Educational Psychology program. The science of learning, teaching, and assessment is at the core of Educational Psychology at Penn State. Students in our graduate program explore how people learn across the lifespan and ways that learning and teaching interconnect and reciprocally influence each other in formal and informal educational settings. Faculty members conduct research in their area of expertise and provide support to graduate degree programs in Educational Psychology and other programs (e.g., CyberScience).
Penn State is committed to and accountable for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion with an emphasis on structurally contingent identities such as race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and national origin. We foster a culture of inclusion that supports both broad and specific diversity initiatives, leverage the educational and institutional benefits of diversity, and engage all individuals to help them thrive. We value inclusion as a core strength and an essential element of our public service mission. Therefore, we are seeking candidates whose research, teaching, and service has prepared them to contribute to our commitment to diversity and inclusion in higher education.
Appointment Conditions
This position is a tenure track, 36-week faculty appointment in the Educational Psychology program with the possibility of supplemental summer appointments in research and/or teaching. This position is co-funded by the College of Education and the Institute for CyberScience. The University offers a competitive benefits package that includes excellent healthcare and tuition benefits for employees and their families, generous retirement benefits, a wide variety of professional development opportunities, supportive work and family benefits, a wealth of health and wellness programs and resources, and much more. The College of Education at Penn State is committed to supporting the work-life balance of its faculty members. Penn State has a strong commitment to the diversity of its workforce and we encourage applications from individuals of diverse backgrounds.
Responsibilities
The successful candidate will: have an active program of research; be responsible for teaching residential and online undergraduate and graduate courses; advise master’s and doctoral graduate students; and provide service to the Department, College, University, and professional organizations or other external agencies.
Required Qualifications
Candidates must have an earned doctorate in Educational Psychology, Learning Sciences, Applied Cognitive or Developmental Science, or a closely related field at the position start date. Candidates who have completed all doctoral work but have not yet defended their dissertation at the time of the application will also be considered. Candidates must also demonstrate a commitment to a significant program of research that has the potential to secure external funding, commensurate with experience. Candidates must provide evidence of excellence in teaching and advising, commensurate with experience. Candidates must show potential to work with underserved and/or underrepresented populations.
We seek a candidate who develops and uses innovative methods to analyze large datasets in the service of improving the design of, and research on, theoretically-grounded interventions that foster learning and instruction as well as the measurement of learning outcomes. Examples of such methods may include, but are not limited to, using unsupervised/supervised machine learning algorithms to explore learning processes, applying natural language processing to identify productive discourse patterns, running complex simulations of how an intervention may alter learning processes, or combining predictive models with observational datasets to improve outcomes (e.g. data assimilation). This list of examples is not exhaustive; other suitably innovative methods for analyzing large datasets in the service of improving learning and instruction will be considered.
As an ICS co-hire, the successful candidate will have expertise in cyber-enabled research, including the development and application of innovative computational methods, and is expected to engage in interdisciplinary research that relies substantially on some combination of big data, complex simulations, machine learning, and related methodologies. Further information on the institute and its co-hires can be found: http://ics.psu.edu.
Desirable Qualifications
The strongest candidates will have
- An established record of publication or the promise of such a record of publication
- Evidence of engagement in theoretically-driven research aimed at the development of interventions to support education and improve learning outcomes
- Ability to teach courses on campus (University Park) and online at the undergraduate and graduate levels in quantitative research methods, implementation science, and/or learning theories.
- An established record of receiving competitive grants or the promise of such record of receiving competitive grants
- The ability to advise master’s and doctoral graduate students
- Commitment to providing service to the Department, College, University, and professional organizations or other external agencies.
The Pennsylvania State University
Penn State [http://www.psu.edu] is a comprehensive, multi-campus research university serving all regions of the Commonwealth, as well as the nation and the world in instruction, research, and service roles that require responsiveness to and support from society’s public and private sectors. As a land-grant university, Penn State is responsible for providing a wide array of programs in the professional and technical disciplines, as well as a balanced offering of undergraduate and graduate programs in the arts and sciences. Penn State shares with other major research universities the traditional responsibilities to discover, develop, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. Penn State libraries was also recently ranked 2nd among public university libraries in the USA in the 2015-2016 Association of Research Libraries Library Investment Index.
The University Park campus is located within State College, PA, which was recently ranked as one of the top college towns in the country by the American Institute for Economic Research. Located in a valley in the Appalachian Mountains, in Centre County, Pennsylvania, employment ast Penn State offers incredible opportunity to enjoy the beauty of the central Pennsylvania outdoors combined with the culture, sports, and entertainment a large university community can bring, and is within drivable distance from Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York City.
The College of Education
The College of Education (https://ed.psu.edu) at Penn State was established in 1923 to deepen and extend knowledge about the formation and utilization of human capabilities. It offers resident degree programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, online learning programs at the graduate level, as well as an extensive outreach effort aimed at continuing professional development for educators at distant locations. The College’s research program is also extensive and College faculty members secured over $36.7 million in external support during the past three years from a wide range of national and state government agencies, private foundations, and corporations. The College’s location within a large, research-oriented, land-grant University provides numerous opportunities for studying education from multidisciplinary perspectives in the context of a university-wide commitment to making life better for all citizens.
The College houses four academic departments: Curriculum and Instruction; Education Policy Studies; Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education; and Learning and Performance Systems. The departments offer eight undergraduate majors to more than 2,250 students and 11 graduate programs, under authority of the Graduate School, to nearly 1,000 students. Recent surveys rank the Penn State College of Education among the top colleges, schools, and departments of education in the United States and the world. The Educational Psychology program’s goal is to conduct translational research through grounded theoretical model building and empirical investigations with overt sensitivities to critical questions of educational importance.
The Institute of CyberScience
The Institute for CyberScience (ICS; https://ics.psu.edu/), one of Penn State’s five university-wide research institutes, connects researchers from numerous disciplines to answer critical scientific questions and societal issues through cyber-enabled research and methodology. ICS has nearly 300 affiliated faculty, with over 20 tenure-track co-hired faculty, engaged in interdisciplinary computation and data enabled research. Our affiliated faculty utilize our ICS operated Advanced Cyber Infrastructure (ICS-ACI), Penn State’s high-performance research cloud, which is in the top 15 among our peers.
Application procedures:
Applicants must submit: (a) a cover letter discussing your qualifications for the position, (b) current curriculum vitae, and (c) up to three representative reprints or preprints of scholarly publications (if available). In addition, (d) please have up to three academic reference letters emailed directly to Janel Fitzgerald, Administrative Assistant at jnf5098@psu.edu. Applications received by Nov. 15, 2019 are assured full consideration; however, applications will be reviewed until the position is filled. Interested persons must submit materials electronically to this link: https://psu.jobs/job/91574
You may direct questions related to this search to:
Dr. Matthew McCrudden, Educational Psychology-ICS Co-Hire Search Chair
333 CEDAR Building, University Park, PA 16802
mtm402@psu.edu
This job announcement is also available in an alternate format. Employment will require successful completion of background check(s) in accordance with University policies. Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the diversity of its workforce.