Senior Efficacy Research and Psychometrics Analyst, Khan Kids (24 months fixed-term)

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THE ROLE

Khan Academy Kids is looking for a Senior Efficacy Research and Psychometrics Analyst (24 months fixed-term) to strengthen the evidence base behind our assessments and learning content for children in PreK through 2nd grade.

This role spans two complementary areas. First, you will lead the technical side of our psychometrics and efficacy research: serving as the primary point of contact for our external research partners, managing recurring data extracts, analyzing and interpreting psychometric findings, and helping translate research into product improvements. Second, you will own analytics and reporting for Khan Academy Kids: building and maintaining our KPI dashboard and preparing the recurring reporting that our leadership, philanthropy, and school partnerships teams rely on to make decisions and tell our impact story.

You will work on a small, interdisciplinary team alongside product managers, engineers, designers, and academic experts and collaborate closely with leading external research organizations. We are looking for someone with strong quantitative training — ideally in psychometrics, educational measurement, or a related field — who is energized by using rigorous evidence to improve learning experiences for young children.

Responsibilities:

(1) Psychometrics & Efficacy Research

• Lead our psychometric research partnership: Serve as the primary technical point of contact for our external psychometric research partnership, supporting study design, data sharing, psychometric analyses, and interpretation of findings
• Extract, clean, and securely share assessment data with research partners on a recurring schedule
• Analyze and interpret psychometric findings, including item difficulty, score distributions, growth analyses, concurrent validity, and IRT-based scoring
• Partner with our product and engineering teams to translate findings into product improvements, such as updates to scoring models and assessment discontinuation rules
• Collaborate with research partners to develop and publish technical documentation, beginning with the technical manual for our PreK assessment
• Recruit and manage research partner sites: Recruit and onboard school and district sites for psychometric and efficacy studies; execute MOUs; align on consent procedures and participant incentives; and coordinate site visits for direct child assessment data collection
• Partner with our legal team to draft and negotiate data-sharing agreements with districts and research organizations, including requirements for pseudonymized and identified data
• Support efficacy research. Coordinate Khan Academy Kids' participation in ongoing efficacy studies and contribute to the design of future studies, aligning internal and external stakeholders on the research approach

(2) Analytics Reporting and Data Infrastructure

• Own Khan Kids’s KPI dashboard: Partner with our engineering team to build and maintain the Khan Academy Kids analytics dashboard,  including  integrations with App Store Connect and Google Play Console. Maintain the dashboard so it can be used by other teams including marketing, school partnerships, and philanthropy.
• Lead recurring reporting: Prepare recurring app performance reporting, including monthly and quarterly business reviews and periodic target setting. Field ad hoc data requests across teams — for example, writing new SQL queries to support targeted district outreach or grant reporting.

• An advanced degree (PhD or Master's) in psychometrics, educational measurement, quantitative methods or a related field — or equivalent applied experience
• Strong grounding in psychometric methods, including item analysis, reliability and validity evidence, growth modeling, and Item Response Theory (IRT)
• Proficiency with SQL and a statistical programming language (e.g., R or Python) for extracting, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data
• Experience with (or eagerness to learn) business intelligence tools such as Looker, and comfort building dashboards and data pipelines
• Familiarity with responsible data-sharing practices in education research, including student data privacy considerations (e.g., FERPA, COPPA) and work with pseudonymized and deidentified data
• Excellent communication skills: able to translate complex psychometric findings into clear implications for product teams, funders, and school partners
• Strong project-management and organizational skills, with the ability to coordinate multiple external partners, recurring deliverables, and data-sharing schedules with close attention to detail
• Proven cross-cultural competency skills, demonstrating self-awareness, awareness of others, and the ability to adopt inclusive perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors to drive inclusion and belonging throughout the organization
• Motivated by Khan Academy’s mission “to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere”

Nice to have:

• Experience with (or strong interest in) early childhood education and assessment of young learners is a plus

• Sal’s TED talk from 2011
• Sal’s TED talk from 2015
• Sal's TED talk from 2023
• Our team:  http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team

We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don't let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we encourage candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.

As part of this commitment, Khan Academy will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process. If reasonable accommodation is needed, please contact careers@khanacademy.org