Postdoctoral Research Associate, Cognitive Foundations of Environmental Science Education

About the Opportunity

Job Summary

We are looking for a Postdoctoral Scholar to join an NSF-funded collaboration between Dr. John Coley (Psychology, Marine and Environmental Sciences) and Dr. Brian Helmuth (Marine and Environmental Sciences, Public Policy and Urban Affairs). Although the position would focus on this cross-disciplinary project, the Postdoctoral Scholar would have the opportunity to be involved in other collaborative research projects between Coley’s Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education Laboratory (CORE Lab) and Helmuth’s Marine Ecological Forecasting, Ecophysiology, and Physical Biology Lab and/or to pursue individual projects in each lab.

The Project

Environmental issues are currently among the most pressing facing humankind. As such, understanding how students learn about environmental science is of supreme importance. Students entering the science classroom bring well-developed intuitive frameworks that help them understand, explain, and predict the world around them. These frameworks, while beneficial in some contexts, may pose obstacles in environmental science education. This project explores how intuitive thinking plays a role in shaping student understanding of human-nature relationships and interactions within environmental science education. Specifically, we are investigating the impacts of a powerful intuitive conceptual framework – human exceptionalism, the belief that humans are separate from the natural world – upon an increasingly dominant paradigm in environmental science – social ecological systems, which acknowledges that human social systems are part of natural ecosystems. Specifically, we’re focusing on how students conceptualize marine social ecological systems, and approaching the question from a developmental perspective by investigating these processes in middle school, high school, and undergraduate students.

Key Responsibilities

● Collaboration as a team member on an NSF-funded study of relations between human exceptionalism and social-ecological systems thinking

● Project management

● Supervising and coordinating undergraduate research assistants

● Helping to mentor masters and doctoral students

● Designing experiments, collecting data, analyzing and writing papers for publication

● Pursuing independent research projects in conjunction with the focus of the labs

Qualifications

● PhD in a field falling within the social, behavioral, cognitive, and/or environmental sciences.

● Experience with human subject research.

● Facility with statistical analyses such as structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and longitudinal analysis

● Demonstrated ability to successfully manage a complex project.

● Eagerness to work as a member of a cross-disciplinary research team.

Not Required but Preferred

● Experience mentoring undergraduate research assistants.

● Experience with coding qualitative data.

● Familiarity with mental modeling, fuzzy cognitive mapping, concept mapping, or some comparable research techniques.

● Some background in environmental or ecological sciences.

● Demonstrated ability to successfully carry out developmental research in a school setting.

Position Type

Research