In this project, you will be carrying out psychometric research with the aim to write several articles that are publishable in peer-reviewed journals and present your work on national and international conferences. Your research combines modern psychometrics, including new data technologies, with practical assessment issues. You will become part of the Department of Methodology and Statistics and will join an active research group in psychometrics. This project is supervised by dr. Wilco Emons, dr. Maria Bolsinova, and prof. Jeroen Vermunt. 

The position also involves contributions to teaching giving the candidate the opportunity to build a teaching portfolio during the PhD project. The position and the environment in which the candidate will be embedded provide an optimal starting point for an academic career in academia in general and psychometrics and statistics in particular. The candidate will follow a customized track of graduate courses as part of the Interuniversity Graduate School of Psychometrics and Sociometrics (IOPS) program which will further develop the candidate’s research skills, background knowledge, and network.

Project description
To ensure that students can get the best out of themselves, it is important to tailor the learning activities to their unique individual needs. To accomplish this goal, we need to closely monitor the individual’s learning progress so that we can effectively match the learning tasks accordingly. This process of feedback and feed-up requires the collection of reliable and valid measurements about learning progress on a regular basis. What progress has been made? Are there subjects in which students progress exceptionally well or lag behind? At the same time, these measurements should be obtained as efficient as possible and preferably naturally embedded in the learning process. Therefore testing time should be kept as short as possible. However, it also means that all available information – either from the test (answers or response times) or related contextual information – is used optimally. The project’s central research question is: How can we measure the learning progress as validly and reliably in the most practical way by using innovative psychometric techniques that can integrate different sources of information about the students? Simulation research and the analysis of existing longitudinal data sets will be used to answer this question.

An ideal candidate should have sound knowledge of psychometrics and statistics, programming skills and affinity with research methods and techniques. Furthermore, the candidate should have (nearly) completed a Master’s degree with excellent academic results in methodology, psychometrics, statistics, quantitative psychology, educational measurement, or a related field.

This is a position for 1.0 FTE (40 hours per week) of the full-time working week. 
The salary amounts to a minimum of €2.541 and a maximum of €3.247 gross per month for full time employment contract, based on UFO profile PhD student and salary scale number PhD’s of the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities. Tilburg University uses a neutral salary system for scaling that is based on relevant education and work experience. You are entitled to a vacation allowance of 8% and a year-end bonus of 8.3% of your gross annual income. If you work 40 hours per week, you will receive 41 paid days of leave per year.
 
Tilburg University offers excellent employment conditions. We think flexibility, professional and personal development, and good employee benefits are important. We make clear agreements about career paths and offer all kinds of facilities and schemes to maintain an optimal balance between work and private life. You can also follow numerous training courses, for example, in the areas of leadership skills, personal effectiveness, and career development.  

Tilburg University values an open and inclusive culture. We embrace diversity and encourage the mutual integration of groups of employees and students. We focus on creating equal opportunities for all our employees and students, so that everyone feels at home in our university community.

Tilburg University has a lively campus in beautiful green surroundings that is easily accessible by public transport. We are committed to a sustainable society and challenge you to make an active contribution.

Please visit working at Tilburg University for more information on our terms of employment. 

Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (TSB) is one of the five faculties of Tilburg University. The teaching and research of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences are organized around the themes of “Adaptive societies, organizations, and workers”, “Healthy life span”, and “Personalized prevention and care”. The School’s inspiring working environment challenges its workers to realize their ambitions, involvement and cooperation are essential to achieve this.   
Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Tilburg University 
Serving society and making it better for its citizens. That is what drives us. Tilburg University's founder, Martinus Cobbenhagen, believed that anyone who wants to understand society must be actively and consciously involved in it. These ideas still form the basis of our university.
 
Under the motto Understanding society, our more than 2,800 employees develop and transfer knowledge and bring people from different disciplines and organizations together. In this way, we want to contribute to solving complex social issues. In doing so, we work from the fields of economics, business and entrepreneurship, social and behavioral sciences, law and administration, humanities and digital sciences and theology.
 
We educate our 20,000 students of 132 nationalities to become Tilburg University Shaped Professionals: responsible and entrepreneurial thinkers, driven by solidarity, a sense of responsibility and empathy, who are able to influence and give direction to a rapidly changing society in an innovative way.

Department of Methodology and Statistics

The Department of Methodology and Statistics is an internationally renowned group, holding several experts in data science methods, latent variable methods, psychometrics, meta-research, survey methodology, and other applied statistics fields. The department has a strong tradition of working with the other (substantive) research programs in our faculty. The department is responsible for the teaching and research in the area of methodology and statistics for the social and behavioral sciences, the Data Science programs (including the joint BSc in Data Science together with the Technical University Eindhoven), and the Liberal Arts and Science program of Tilburg University. The department is a member of the Interuniversity Graduate School for Psychometrics and Sociometrics (IOPS).