The Role: 

Newsela is seeking an out-of-the box thinker to bring educational measurement expertise to Newsela’s newly formed Learning department. As Newsela’s first Psychometrician, you’ll primarily be responsible for creating, maintaining, and improving metrics summarizing dimensions of student learning on the Newsela platform, and developing technical and non-technical documentation to help stakeholders interpret and act on said metrics. These metrics will not only reflect students’ academic growth and achievement, but take a whole child perspective, also measuring constructs such as affective, behavioral, and cognitive student learning engagement. Additionally, you’ll play a key role in elevating Newsela’s formative assessment strategy, conducting analyses to determine if Newsela is providing fair, accurate, and equitable formative assessment experiences for all learners, and partnering with Newsela’s Curriculum & Instruction, Reporting & Insights, and Recommendations Teams to envision next-generation Newsela formative assessments.

Why You’ll Love This Role:

As Newsela’s first educational measurement analyst, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the formative assessment and reporting strategy for a product transforming K-12 education, establishing best practices in the process of developing innovative, actionable, and multi-dimensional metrics. The metrics you create will power learning for millions of educators and K-12 students around the country. Newsela also has external partnerships in place to ensure your success in this role - chiefly a partnership with one of America’s leading interim assessment creators that will give you access outside reading assessment data for over 60,000 students from over 20 states.

Why We’ll Love You: 

You hold an advanced degree in Psychometrics, Educational Measurement, Quantitative Psychology, Applied Statistics, or a related field, with professional experience leveraging psychometrician skills to solve real-world applied problems (preferably in the K-12 space). You have fluency working in scientific programming environments like R or Python to apply classical test theory and/or item response theory to large-scale, complex datasets. You may even have experience running multilevel models and applying machine learning to measurement challenges. Although not a requirement for the job, it would also be advantageous if you had prior experience querying large databases using SQL. You’re also a strong communicator, able to skillfully code-switch between technical and non-technical language to clearly convey complexities of assessments and metrics.

About Newsela 

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.