Scientific Director - AERDF

AERDF

https://aerdf.org/ 

Organization 

The Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) is a national nonprofit initiative that supports ambitious Inclusive R&D programs designed to tackle intractable teaching and learning challenges that disproportionately affect Black and Latino students and students of all races experiencing poverty. We identify compelling leaders with ambitious goals for improving student learning to serve as Executive Directors. To reach those goals, Executive Directors build on existing evidence from learning science to design multi-year Inclusive R&D programs to translate fundamental insights into more useful practices, approaches and tools.

Assessment for Good (AFG), which sits within AERDF, is committed to supporting the creation of asset-based assessment and intervention tools that honor the continuum of a learner’s development across the academic, emotional, and social domains. AFG, along with AERDF, seeks to advance research and development activities that elevate the needs of Black and Latinx learners and learners of all races experiencing poverty.

Opportunity for Impact

AFG is seeking a full-time Scientific Director (SD) to join its leadership team and help design and lead the program’s research strategy. Reporting directly to the Executive Director, Temple Lovelace, and working in close collaboration with others, this leader will ensure AFG has the dynamic and agile research roadmap needed to deliver upon the organization's scientific discoveries. This critical role will also ensure that leaders across AFG are poised to make data-based decisions in service of advancing program aims. This is an ideal role for someone with a demonstrated commitment to research at the intersection of formative assessment and innovation who is committed to advancing educational equity. 

Role and Responsibilities

• You’ll collaboratively design and execute research activities for AFG, leading a strong experimental program reflecting the integration of emerging and primary research that will require responsiveness and flexibility in research tasks. 
  • You’ll execute these efforts aligned with the data policies and practices required by AERDF and AFG. This includes leading multiple, complex research projects that will be at various stages of development at the same time. 
• As a member of the senior leadership at AFG, you’ll lead strategic visioning related to the research roadmap for the program, which requires end-to-end experience managing a complex research program that involves multiple partners and studies which will require frequent communication and coordination with the internal research team, external R&D teams and partners, and the AFG team at large. 
  • This research roadmap will reflect an aggressive path of scientific discovery that connects new insights on child development that are gathered from the assessment prototypes generated by AFG and AFG’s R&D partners. 
  • Within our integrated leadership group, you will collaborate with the Director of Strategy to integrate innovative and validated assessment measures into innovative delivery mechanisms and the Associate Director of Implementation to ensure our research and development efforts involve our priority communities. 
  • You will co-develop, in consultation with our Director of Strategy, the integration of a robust data analytic infrastructure across research and product, which includes research results and findings from our internal work and external R&D teams to generate valuable insights and strategic recommendations that reflect the success of and inform future elements of our research strategy. This includes management of our external AFG Data & Analytics Center, a collaborative project with an external partner for all of AFG’s prototypes. 
• You’ll continue to iterate on the flexible infrastructure needed for research at AFG, which is a highly agile, inclusive research and development environment. You’ll collaborate with the program team to create and implement a responsive strategy for active management of complex research and development projects. 
• You’ll manage the processes for transformational research at AFG which coalesces educators, practitioners, learners, caregivers, developers, and researchers towards an emancipatory framework for R&D. 
  • This research strategy includes both internal and external research activities that lead to the creation of assessment measure prototypes that reflect a developmental approach to measuring indicators associated with AFG’s core levers. 
  • This includes the coordination of human subjects research approvals, internal approval protocols associated with our assessment prototypes, and coordination of internal approvals through AERDF for human subjects research. 
• You’ll execute on-the-ground research in collaboration with our Research Scientists, R&D teams, and a small group of contractors, ensuring all of the components for creating new assessment measures that capture the dynamic experiences of learners and educators in K12 settings are created.
• You’ll set annual goals for our integrated research and development strategy that elevates new frontiers in the formative assessment of within the academic, emotional, executive function, ecological, and social domains. This includes overseeing internal research and development operations, in consultation with the Director of Operations & Innovation, ensuring that spend is consistent with allocated resources across multiple tracks of research.
• You’ll ensure AFG is able to contribute to the larger scientific community through scheduling the program’s conference presentations and research-based publications that meet the dissemination needs of our program. This includes peer-reviewed publications and similar contributions that reflect our program’s scientific discoveries. 
• You will coordinate and support multi-level research projects with external partners in service of generating promising assessment items and measures.
• You’ll contribute to an inclusive team culture and operating norms that center our team’s and organization’s values to bring together the unique arms of our work across research, product, and partnerships in service of our mission and commitment to inclusive R&D. 
• You will oversee the development and implementation of a comprehensive evaluation model that will be used to trial multiple AFG prototypes through a rich set of complex experimental designs. This will include managing internal and external staff that contribute to the evaluation of AFG’s R&D portfolio. 

Qualifications

• You have 8 - 10 years experience with at least 5 of those years with demonstrated success in leading a research lab. Individuals with a specialization in psychology (clinical, social, developmental, or school), educational psychology or learning sciences are especially encouraged to apply. 
• You have comprehensive knowledge of how to leverage advanced statistical and computational analytic tools, including how they are utilized within our assessment prototypes to determine learner growth and development and how they are leveraged to determine overall research program success.
• You recognize that the systems that surround our learners are inequitable, and you believe in a theory of change centered around making the assets of Black and Latinx learners visible. 
  • You are deeply committed to creating a new system of assessment that focuses on student experience and wellbeing, which will lead to better secondary and post-secondary outcomes.
• You have managed or been deeply connected to many of the functions you’ll support in this role: schools, out of school, and / or community partnerships, assessment deployment and data meetings, educator training around formative assessment and tech-enabled assessment tools, internal culture building, and deeply engaging educators. Though experienced, you have a generalist skill set and a determination to expand and refine those skills.
• You’re driven for impact and results and have a track record of successfully executing projects to completion, in a collaborative and asset-based way. 
• You know when input or clarity is needed and have no problem asking for help. You can quickly sift through information and inputs to identify what is most important and/or urgent to resolve and have shown resourcefulness in your past experiences to unblocking blockers.
• You know how to use and build supportive operational systems across Google applications, Slack, Asana, Airtable, Notion, Jira, and the like. New products and systems don’t intimidate you, but instead energize you as a key element of project implementation. 
• You are able to effectively work in a remote environment and are able to travel up to 35% for in-person team meetings, retreats, partner visits, research implementation, convenings, and conferences as it is safe to do so. This percentage may fluctuate across the year depending upon our research needs. 

Personal Characteristics

• A demonstrated commitment to embedding diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in daily work and research priorities.
• Passion for supporting innovation and pursuing excellence with Black and Latino students in traditional and non-traditional education spaces.
• A high degree of self-awareness and a relationship orientation that inspires and motivates others. 
• A passion for learning and continuous improvement. A professional charge to ensure equity for those most underserved by our current educational system; and, have shown a personal commitment to creating and contributing to equity-centered courageous team cultures and have a desire to spend every day working towards this outcome and gain energy from working with people to build ecosystems that are committed to similar goals. 
• An excitement for the ambiguity and pace that comes with working in a start-up environment and experience navigating shifting priorities and responsibilities

Additional Info & Compensation

AERDF offers a competitive compensation package including base salary and comprehensive benefits. AERDF is a remote and flexible work environment and base compensation levels vary depending on location, experience, and qualifications. The starting salary range for this Level 5 - Director position is $141,000 - $203,000 (based on location). AERDF is deeply committed to the diversity of its workforce. People of all backgrounds, particularly those with the lived experience of the students and communities AERDF serves, are encouraged to apply.  Please do not hesitate to apply even if all of the qualifications are not met. Candidates of all backgrounds and identities are encouraged to apply.

This role is a time-bound position that will end at the close of 2026 when AFG's program with AERDF ends. We will re-evaluate extending this position at that time relevant to the transition of AFG’s R&D initiatives beyond 2026.

Learn More

• Putting Education Researchers and Teachers on Equal Footing
• Tired of the same old student assessments? This fund wants to help
• A Bold Initiative to Accelerate Research and Development in Education
• Education Innovations Deserve as Much Philanthropic Investment as Support for Medical Research
• AERDF announces Auditi Chakravarty as CEO starting April 3