Data Analyst

Department
 

Consortium Research Usher

About the Department
 

For over 30 years, the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) has informed solutions to the most difficult problems facing urban schools. The UChicago Consortium is committed to better understanding the fundamental practices and conditions that advance student learning, promote attainment, and foster more equitable outcomes. We work in a highly collaborative environment that produces research of high technical quality to inform policy and practice in the Chicago Public Schools, as well as schools nationwide. A central component of our work is engaging with a diverse set of stakeholders and stimulating evidence-driven discourse about the vital issues facing schools. The UChicago Consortium has been described as the “gold standard” for education research-practice partnerships and has been replicated nationally. Our research has been an essential factor in improving outcomes for students and school staff, both in Chicago and in school districts across the country.

For more information about the UChicago Consortium, see consortium.uchicago.edu.

Job Summary
 

UChicago Consortium is seeking a Data Analyst to do work on behalf of the UChicago Consortium on School Research and the To&Through project. The person’s work will focus on synthesizing, cleaning, and quality checking data from Chicago Public School’s Naviance system and from the district’s Senior Exit Questionnaire (SEQ). This will include making the data compatible across years so that it can be used to conduct longitudinal analyses. Specifically, the Data Analyst employee will take part in a project updating some of the data from the 2008 report Potholes On The Road To College, and the scope of her work on the Naviance and SEQ data will be limited to the years of data and variables relevant to that project. This may include variables pertaining to students’ postsecondary aspirations and plans, and their college applications, acceptances, and enrollments. The Data Analyst work will be done in SAS with extensive comments throughout the code indicating what each step is doing so that it can be replicated by another analyst in R. The ensuing cleaned data set will be the property of the Consortium, while any ensuing code and any data guidance or codebook will be shared with both the Consortium and CPS. The Data Analyst will meet with To&Through staff every other week for an hour and update her CPS team and supervisor of her progress. This is a remote position.

Responsibilities

• Identify appropriate statistical techniques that will answer different research questions and find ways to interpret the results of analyses.

• Create specialized data bases by merging multiple, complex data sources, including school-, student-, teacher-, community-, and neighborhood-based files.

• Conduct data quality control procedures and update and create internal processes and data documentation.

• Conduct statistical analysis of large-scale databases, including both simple descriptive group comparisons and advanced statistical modeling.

• Create visualizations of findings.

• Guides data collection, evaluation and analysis. Designs and manages databases. Writes reports, articles and manuscripts.

• Presents research findings at meetings and conferences, as well as to funding agencies. Conducts literature reviews. Develop and maintain liaisons and effective working relations with groups and individuals, agencies, and the public to encourage cooperative management strategies or to develop information and interpret findings.

• Performs other related work as needed.

Minimum Qualifications
 

Education:

Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field.

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Work Experience:

Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 5-7 years of work experience in a related job discipline.

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Certifications:

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Preferred Qualifications

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in public policy, economics, sociology or other relevant social science or mathematical discipline.

• Master’s degree in public policy, economics, sociology or other relevant social science or mathematical discipline strongly preferred.

• Coursework in statistics.

Experience:

• At least 2-3 years of experience in urban education research, policy and practice strongly preferred.

Preferred Competencies

• Knowledge and demonstrated use of multivariate statistics (including multiple regression and logistic regression).

• Familiarity with one or more programming languages (e.g., SAS, Sta