The National Institute of Education invites suitable applications for the position of Research Assistant/Associate on a 3-month contract at the Office of Education Research (OER) with a possibility of extension for one to two years.
Title for Project 1: How do Singaporean children understand “I can choose”? Phase 2: Examining early development of free will, mindset, achievement goals, and persistence
Title for Project 2: Singaporean Children’s Emotion Socialization
Introduction for Project 1:
The proposed study aims to address three objectives with three studies.
Objective 1 (Study 1): Examine individual differences in Singaporean children’s achievement-related beliefs, goals, and memories. We will interview Singaporean children aged 4y to 10y on questions regarding their free will belief, mindset, achievement goals, and achievement-related memories. We will examine relations between these measures, and whether they differ from results from American children.
Objective 2 (Study 2): Trace Singaporean children’s early achievement-related behaviours and parents’ reactions to it. For 3 visits (1.5y, 3y, 4y) from a longitudinal study (BE-POSITIVE), we will code and analyse children and parents’ behaviours when presented with a challenging task after an easy task.
Objective 3 (Study 3): Investigate how early achievement-related experiences predict 4-year-olds’ achievement-related beliefs, and explore potential moderating factors. Children from Study 2 will be interviewed with questions used in Study 1 to examine the relation between children’s earlier achievement-related experiences and later achievement-related beliefs. We will also explore the potential moderating roles of external factors such as family background, and internal factors such as children’s temperament.
Introduction for Project 2:
The specific objectives are as follows.
Examine Singaporean parents’ emotion socialization during shared book reading with young children (0-4 years old). Family emotion socialization plays an important role in children’s emotional development, especially in early life. Particularly, mother-child conversations during shared book reading or past event reminiscing contribute to children’s learning about the causes and consequences of emotions, and the strategies to cope with distress (Doan et al., 2019; Doan & Wang, 2010). During mother-child conversations, discussion of emotions or other internal states makes thoughts and feelings explicit and helps children understand thoughts and feelings, whereas discussion of behaviors may draw children’s attention outwards and impede children’s emotion understanding and regulation. In Study 1, we will code parent-child conversations during the shared book reading task in Be POSITIVE to examine Singaporean parents' emotion socialization and its relations with children’s social-emotional development, such as emotion understanding, theory of mind, and social competence. Examine Singaporean teachers’ emotion socialization with children in preschools (4-6 years old). In addition to parents, teachers are also potential socializers with whom children interact frequently. Thus, teachers also play an important role in emotion coaching through structured activities, e.g., storytelling and book reading, and everyday interactions. A few studies have suggested that childcare centers or preschools are important social contexts for children to learn about emotions through teacher-child interactions (Ahn, 2005; Denham et al., 2020). However, little is known about the emotion socialization among Singaporean teachers or its relations with children’s social-emotional development. In Study 2, we plan to utilize Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project (SKIP) data to code teacher-child interactions in the classroom, e.g., during shared book reading activities, and explore the relations between teachers’ emotion socialization and children’s social-emotional development, such as emotion understanding, theory of mind, and social competence.
Requirements
- Have a Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline (e.g. Psychology, Philosophy, Education), or expect to have such a degree by the starting time of the position
- Experience with research with young children
- Experience with data management and analysis
- Experience with or interest to learn tools for data management and analysis (e.g., RedCap, R, SPSS)
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with colleagues to clean and manage data from a large longitudinal study
- Data coding and analysis
- Assist in the development of research projects in seeking appropriate funding
- Writing reports/manuscripts and making posters/oral presentations to disseminate results
- Managing paperwork related to the project
- Other research related tasks as assigned by the Principal Investigator
Application
Applicants (external and internal) will apply via Workday. We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.
Workday Job Requisition ID: R00018953
(https://ntu.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/Careers/job/NTU-Main-Campus-Singapore/Research-Assistant--Centre-for-Research-in-Child-Development--Office-of-Education-Research---NIE-_R00018953)
Closing Date
Closing date for advertisements will be set to 14 calendar days from date of posting.
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