Description

Employer Profile

Gibson Consulting Group, Inc. is a privately held and nationally recognized education consulting and research firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. Founded in 1998, we have decades of experience working with school districts of all sizes, state education agencies, and other educational organizations in Texas and in 30 other states.

Our mission is to “Better the lives of students by providing exemplary educational consulting and research services that make education systems more efficient and effective.” We work to accomplish this mission through a unique blend of competencies including program evaluation, educational research, surveys, internal audit, process re-engineering, and efficiency review services to our clients.

Team Profile

Gibson’s research team is a small group of passionate and intellectually curious researchers. We conduct policy-relevant research at the district, state, and federal levels, exploring education research questions informed by some of the most challenging problems confronting educators, researchers, and policymakers today. We are looking to grow our team with a Quantitative Research Scientist who shares our energy and enthusiasm for tackling complex problems in education research and is looking for a collaborative environment with opportunities to support various research projects across multiple project teams. We are searching for candidates who are interested in public education, education research, evaluation of education programs, and learning about improving the way schools operate.

Position Summary

This position will be responsible for conducting education research and evaluating education programs for school districts, states, regional service centers, education research centers, and other public and private organizations. The position will primarily, but not exclusively, support the quantitative work within the research and evaluation portfolio.

Essential Functions

Managing, cleaning, and analyzing large-scale educational datasets, including:

• Executing all data management and statistical analysis in an explicit and reproducible fashion using annotated and documented scripts.
• Writing efficient and robust code for data preparation, analysis, and reporting (including looping and working with macros).
• Assembling panel data, conducting quality control checks, producing descriptive statistics, and selecting and fitting appropriate statistical models.
• Communicating results of statistical analyses through written reports, presentations, briefings, customized static scorecards, interactive dashboards, and other medium for dissemination.
• Designing evaluation frameworks that measure the impact of programs on interim and long-term outcomes.
• Providing statistical consulting to clients regarding the appropriate use of existing data.
• Contributing expertise to the development of evaluation or research proposals in response to competitive Request for Proposals or grant funding opportunities issued by school districts, state education agencies, the federal government, and private foundations.
• Supporting large-scale multi-site data collection (district administrative data, student/staff/parent survey data). This includes writing scripts to efficiently import, check, clean, and standardize often messy and incomplete data from numerous districts, colleges, or universities. These scripts should be easy to update with new and corrected data and clearly document coding decisions and reasoning.
• Developing and aligning research protocols, including surveys, and interview and focus group guides.

Required Qualifications

• Advanced Stata programming skills (experience with Python in addition to Stata is a plus).
• Experience managing and cleaning large, complex datasets (candidates will be required to provide sample scripts).
• Experience through coursework or applied research projects with statistical and econometric methods commonly used in social science research.
• Familiarity with the principles of sound research design.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the education sector.
• Experience with quasi-experimental methods for observational data.
• A passion for data management and preparation as well as the belief that each new data management project is an opportunity to write better code and learn something new.
• Experience automating the production of reports from a statistical program, especially LaTeX or HTML.
• Experience building interactive dashboards using tools such as Shiny or Dash.
• Experience translating complex statistical concepts and research findings into understandable and meaningful results.

Desired Education

The ideal candidate will have a Ph.D. or graduate training in a social science field, such as educational psychology, political science, psychology, economics, sociology, or human development. Relevant experience can substitute for advanced educational credentials.

Employment Conditions, Expectations, and Assurances

This exempt full-time position will require 40 hours of work per week, usually Monday through Friday. This position requires that the incumbent sit or stand for extended periods of time while working on a computer. The ability to travel occasionally is required. This is a fully remote position. Flexible hours and work schedules will be considered after an individual establishes a track record of strong performance. Please note that this position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship.

Gibson is headquartered in Austin, Texas and offers a competitive salary, opportunities for performance bonuses, generous vacation and personal leave, retirement benefits that include 401(k) matching, and employer contributions to health and life insurance. All employment with Gibson is at-will.

The salary range for this position is $100,000 - $120,000 and will be commensurate with the candidate’s experience and expertise.

Gibson Consulting Group, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. To learn more about us, please visit www.gibsonconsult.com.

Please complete this form to apply:

https://gibson.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bQpF9emodi0duDA

In it, you will be asked to enter your contact information and upload your cover letter, resume, writing sample, and syntax sample.