Senior Psychometrician and Researcher

Senior Psychometrician and Researcher

Lexia, a Cambium Learning® Group company, empowers educators through adaptive assessment and personalized instruction. For 40 years, the company has been on the leading edge of research and product development as it relates to student reading skills. With a robust offering that includes solutions for differentiated instruction, personalized learning, and assessment, Lexia provides educators with the tools to intensify and accelerate literacy skills development for students of all abilities.

Location: Fully Remote in the USA.

Job Overview:

Lexia is seeking a Sr. Psychometrician and Researcher who is interested in applying their skills to our mission: delivering the highest quality literacy programs and best-in-class educational technology experiences to Lexia's millions of students and educators. We seek a curious, self-motivated professional to develop and validate ways of ensuring that Lexia’s instructional and assessment data provide actionable information for educators.

Job Responsibilities:

• Researches and engages in data science activities, as directed by team lead E.g., ongoing exploration and understanding of the connection between progress in student programs and external measures of progress and proficiency, exploration of very formative measures of increasing mastery and their relationships with assessment performance.

• With direction from the team lead, conceptualizes and implements all psychometric analyses.

• Performs all psychometric analyses for team responsible for developing and enhancing Lexia's methods and approach for its:

  • Patented Assessment Without Testing

  • Embedded assessment

  • Auto placement into instructional content

• Provides expertise to assessment content teams on the development of embedded assessment (e.g., for items and sections) using technology and paper-based formats.

• Guides technical and research design for new assessment elements in the program to meet industry standards.

• Is accountable for basic statistical design and analysis decisions.

• Serves as a psychometric resource for other internal teams across Lexia.

• Collaborates with internal teams to understand their goals and jointly scope psychometric/research/data support to meet their needs.

• Co-creates and/or advises on visualizations of assessment metrics and concepts in educator dashboard reports.

• Organizes and collaborates on data for visualizations and in exports.

• Collaborate with Lexia's Analytics Engineering team to understand data sources/structures/meaning.

• Reviews existing, and drafts and refines new, technical documentation around assessment metrics in collaboration with team lead and content team.

• Evolves systems of document/file organization for collaborative access that adhere to strict data/information privacy/governance guidelines.

• Must have excellent computer programming skills

​Job Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Statistics, Psychological Measurement, Education Measurement, Psychometrics, or related field with an emphasis on quantitative analysis or psychometrics. ABD will be considered.

• Interest in research activities outside of psychometrics and desire to evolve data science skills.

• Thorough understanding of Classical Test Theory

• Deep understanding and 3+ years’ experience with Item Response Theory (IRT) including as the main psychometrician for modeling and guiding implementation. Must be trained in, and experienced with, item calibration and differential item functioning analyses.

• Meaningful experience and expertise with Rasch or IRT modeling software (e.g., Parscale, XCALIBRE, Winsteps/Facets)

• Knowledge of reading and assessment theory, strategies, instruments, and data collection and analysis methodologies

• Advanced knowledge of research design principles and experience with applied statistics/data analysis

• Ability to translate complex information into easy-to-understand data visualizations, insightful summaries, and data tools.

• Knowledge of culturally responsive assessment practices

• Ability to work very collaboratively with variety of stakeholders.

• Functional organizational, communication and writing/editing skills

• Ability to work autonomously to review and create educator-friendly resources.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Formal assessment development experience for K-12 settings

• Experience with large-scale assessment programs: e.g., a department of education, testing industry, or a large school district.

• Peer-reviewed publications, as lead analyst, involving Rasch or IRT modeling

• Knowledge and experience with widely used diagnostic and standardized testing measures to assess reading and language skills for grades K - 12.

• Advanced knowledge of reading and assessment theory, strategies, instruments, and data collection and analysis methodologies

• Experience in machine learning/AI techniques (GLM/regression, clustering, decision tree learning, neural networks, LLMs, etc.)

• Proficient in working with SQL- and Postgres-based databases.

• Expertise in statistical programming (R, Python, SAS, etc.)

To learn more about our organization and the exciting work we do, visit https://www.lexialearning.com/

An Equal Opportunity Employer

We are dedicated to fostering a culture that celebrates unique backgrounds, ideas, and experiences. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability.