Senior Research Associate - Psychometrician

Date Posted: 03/19/2025
Req ID: 42132
Faculty/Division: Faculty of Pharmacy
Department: Faculty of Pharmacy
Campus: St. George (Downtown Toronto)

About Us:

The Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto is Canada’s top faculty of pharmacy and ranked among the top in the world. We bring together Canada’s leading scientists, researchers, and educators in the heart of Toronto’s innovation and health research ecosystem. We advance professional pharmacy practice and pharmaceutical science through world-leading education and research and are recognized worldwide for our outstanding scholarship, ingenuity, creativity, and impact. 

Our faculty, students, staff, and alumni come together to create a vibrant, collaborative environment rich with possibilities. We are at the forefront of redefining pharmacy’s impact in health care and developing the capacity of pharmaceutical science to pinpoint better therapeutic targets, create new ways of building medications, and ensure medication use is safe and effective. We are committed to achieving inclusive excellence and fostering an environment where each member of our community can achieve their full potential. 

Learn more: www.pharmacy.utoronto.ca 

Description:

Through ongoing educational research and under the general guidance of the Associate Dean, Academic (ADA), the Director, Academic Administrative Services, at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy (LDFP), and the Director of the PharmD Program, the Senior Research Associate – Psychometrician, plays a key role in designing, implementing, and evaluating sustainable assessment practices that enhance PharmD student success and program excellence. Primary responsibilities include evaluating longitudinal learning outcomes, conducting student survey research, and performing in-depth analyses of student success. This includes quality assurance of assessments, providing consultation and high-level advice to program leadership, and supporting scholarship as required. This position manages programmatic assessment at the LDFP, ensuring continuous quality improvement across all faculty offerings.

Responsibilities:

Programmatic Assessment:

• In collaboration with faculty, jointly lead and design implementation of program level assessment to enhance curriculum goals and student performance
• Collaborates on leading, developing, conducting, and evaluating assessments and program evaluation data to support institutional planning, analysis, and student success
• Collaborates on leading ongoing quality improvement of assessments across the curriculum 
• Provides expertise in assessment, evaluations, quality metrics, analytics and tools designed to support education-related committees
• Using best evidence in assessment, develops and implements new customized assessment tools to evaluate special initiatives and faculty goals.
• Provides contextualized insights to senior leadership to inform evidence-based decision making at the faculty level.
• Responsible for the management of research data sets of student performance; analyzes trends and patters in institutional performance over time and continually investigates relationship between program components and educational outcomes.
• Supports PharmD curricular mapping activities that require programmatic assessment and accreditation, including ongoing relevant update of the database, reporting and mapping research results to NAPRA (National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities) competencies and AFPC (Association of Faculties of Pharmacy in Canada) outcomes. 
• Based on findings, incorporates new trends and best practices in program evaluation from leading academic environments and academic journals to ensure the faculty achieves and continues to be recognized as a national leader in pharmacy education. 
• Collect, analyze, interpret, visualize, and report on data from assessments such as the National Graduating Students Survey, graduate student focus groups, Alumni Survey, Faculty and Staff Survey, research bibliometrics, ongoing student surveys, and others to support institutional planning and analysis.

Research & Quality Assurance:

• Oversee data collection processes, ensuring alignment and quality assurance to maintain robust and reliable datasets.
• Independently analyze data, interpret results and work closely with stakeholders to develop actionable recommendations that inform strategic decision-making
• Supports ongoing assessment research in collaboration with major stakeholders.
• Supports faculty in the publication of research and presents findings as needed
• Provides peer review services for education journals as required. 
• Oversees the student course evaluation process.
• Outlines assessment related goals in alignment with the faculty’s strategic plan. 
• Responsible for creating re-occurring research reports on assessment findings.
• Design, develop and maintain comprehensive data dashboards and reports using effective visualization strategies
• Utilize data analysis tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, etc. to create interactive dashboards

Educational Assessment

• As part of the assessment research, maintains assessment blueprints and analyzes performance data from the faculty’s courses and milestone assessments to evaluate student achievement of educational outcomes. 
• Analyzes research metrics related to milestone assessments; reports its interpretation and makes recommendations to faculty academic leaders as appropriate. 
• Based on research findings, develops metrics to identify students in need of remediation. 
• Analyzes analysis findings to assist instructors in understanding psychometric data to alter, update, remove or add questions to improve the reliability and validity of academic assessments used at the faculty. 

Qualifications:

Education:

• PhD in psychology, education, measurement or related field
• Education and/or Experience in Health Sciences an asset

Experience:

• Minimum 5 years of experience in conducting, analyzing and reporting on quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research required
• Demonstrated experience working in programmatic assessment, student learning and/or program evaluation
• Demonstrated ability to effectively run descriptive and inferential statistics using statistical software
• Training and experience in research related with programmatic assessment, the alignment of curriculum/ instructional design with assessment methods and learning theory is required
• 5 years of experience in programmatic assessment required.
• Experience working with university students and trainees.  
• Strong communication skills including presentations, reports, and preparing manuscripts for submission to peer reviewed scientific journals and research proposals to granting agencies and prospective industry partners.
• Strong educational and professional background in programmatic assessment applied research methods, and quantitative and qualitative data analysis. 
• Proven ability to apply data visualization techniques to present findings clearly and effectively
• Ability to work independently and in a team environment
• Experience with research scientific writing and research scientific literacy.
• Familiarity with research ethics guidelines and principles an asset

Closing Date: 04/09/2025, 11:59PM ET
Employee Group: Research Associate
Appointment Type: Budget - Continuing
Schedule: Full-Time
Pay Scale Group & Hiring Zone: R02 -- Sr. Research Associates $61,510 - $107,439 - $124,864 (open)
Job Category: Research Administration & Teaching