Department of Educational Studies (EDST)
DESCRIPTION: Seeking a graduate student at the master’s or doctoral level to work on a research project that will investigate the pedagogical values, professional careers, and personal life courses of Canada’s earliest special education teachers.
The two-year Hampton Grant funded project is directed by Dr. Jason Ellis, Assistant Professor, EDST, and is entitled “A Special Vocation: Teachers of Early Special Education Classes in Two Canadian City School Systems, 1910 to 1945.”
CONDITIONS: The Graduate student researchers will receive an hourly wage of $24.96 for a master’s student or $27.04 for a doctoral student with benefits.
POSITION: DATABASE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS/PROGRAMMING RESEARCHER.
The starting date for this position is approximately November 17, 2014 to February 6, 2015. The hours of work are 10 hours/week.
NATURE OF WORK:
- The database design and analysis/programming researcher will be responsible for: (1) designing a database; preparing data entry protocols and codebook; cleaning data entered by researchers; maintaining the database; managing version control and files on an FTP site; and, providing quality assurance on the database. (Database to consist of information on the demographic profiles and professional activities of teachers who taught special classes in Toronto and Vancouver);
- for, (2) extracting and performing statistical analysis of quantitative data from the database in order to answer research questions posed by the project director;
- and for, (3) programming in Python (or a similar language, such as R) to scrape or data mine the World Wide Web (WWW) for historical sources that have been digitized, such as school board directories, census records, newspapers, and other sources, in order to identify further information about special class teachers; collecting and archiving this data for inclusion in the database; some data entry.
QUALIFICATIONS:
Education:
- The applicant should be enrolled in a master’s or doctoral program in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia.
- A background in History (e.g. BA, MA or other degree or diploma, major or minor concentration, in History); or Computer science (or closely related fields, e.g. Statistics) (e.g. BSc, MSc, other degree or diploma, major or minor) would be an asset, but is not a requirement.
- Applicants whose academic preparation (or academic preparation and knowledge and experience) combines History, humanities, or social sciences with programming or statistics are urged to apply (this combined background is not a requirement).
Knowledge and experience:
- (Required.) Experience or knowledge designing, maintaining and extracting and analysing information in databases.
- (Required.) Experience applying quantitative research methods and principles.
- (Required.) Statistical analysis of quantitative data experience.
- (Required.) Experience or knowledge programming in Python (or R).
- (Not required, but would be an asset.) Experience or knowledge programming for web-scraping or data mining the WWW for archival or library information (for e.g. using pymarc; automatic downloading with wget; downloading with query strings).
- (Not required, but would be an asset.) Some general familiarity with qualitative research methods and principles.
Skills:
- Intermediate to advanced computing skills in the areas described.
- Intermediate to advanced data science or statistical analysis skills (e.g. working with multidimensional data).
- Ability to work independently and creatively solve problems.
- Ability to follow timelines, instructions and meet deadlines.
- Attention to detail.
Please submit:
- a cover letter that is no more than one page in length and that speaks specifically to your qualifications for the position;
- an up-to-date current Curriculum Vitae;
- names, titles, and contact information for up to two academic or professional references.
Please submit all materials by email to Dr. Jason Ellis (j.ellis@ubc.ca) no later than 11:59 p.m. on October 10, 2014.