Mixing substantial perspectives and analytics to learn from institutional higher education data

The UvA’s executive board has granted funding for a new Research Priority Area (RPA) in ‘Building Interdisciplinary Team Science for Future-proof Higher Education’. This RPA includes two fully funded four-year PhD projects in Educational Data Science.

These two PhD projects leverage the University of Amsterdam’s rich institutional data infrastructure to investigate learning, course design, and assessment in higher education using data science and AI. Drawing on data from online testing platforms, student information systems, learning management systems and student performance (including student assignments, feedback, examination results and student evaluations). The successful candidates will study how assessment policies, institutional practices and GenAI tools shape student success, fairness and curricular validity in university programmes.
Across the projects, you will use multiple perspectives (e.g., psychometric, sociological, economic, and educational approaches) to explore how students differ in their learning processes and outcomes, and how course and curriculum design can better respond to these differences. Key themes are how potential biases in examination and evaluation practices can obscure or distort these differences, or unevenly affect specific student groups, and how exam regulations and course design can help mitigate such biases. This includes studying patterns in student engagement and progression, examining how different instructional and organisational choices relate to performance and persistence, and identifying ways to support more personalised and inclusive learning trajectories.

Study projects will focus on mapping individual differences in student performance, studying how these are related to student background variables, assessing intervention programmes aimed at mitigating inequalities, and assessment and biases therein. Across projects, we will study the effects of GenAI in teaching, learning, and assessment. Some examples of projects we are currently preparing include research into the efficacy of extra-time policies, the effects of different testing regimes (such as compensatory testing), as well as the evaluation of AI-generated grading and feedback. Candidates will be involved in further shaping and executing these studies as well as developing research projects beyond the first year of their PhD trajectory.

Researchers from five UvA faculties are developing a team science infrastructure to facilitate collaboration, ensure the use of interdisciplinary perspectives, and enable secure access to the UvA’s institutional data. Within this collaborative framework, you will be guided by two core supervisors (associate professors Dr. Niels Smits and Dr. Ingmar Visser) and project-specific collaborators from across the UvA.

What are you going to do

Perform data curation: Extract, transform, merge, and combine data from the UvA’s many databases.
Use these data to answer scientific questions that relate to learning and assessment.
Integrate multiple perspectives and data science approaches to find solutions for challenges in higher education.
Play an active role in further developing a team science-infrastructure for UvA’s research into higher education, for example by organising seminars related to your research or presenting your research findings to educational policy makers.
Report on the outcomes of your studies in the form of papers that together form a PhD thesis.

What do you have to offer

A finished (research) master’s degree in the social and/or behavioural sciences (or other relevant field) with a strong focus on quantitative methods (i.e., statistics, analytics, or artificial intelligence);
demonstrable skills in programming (e.g., R or Python) and working with large data files;
ability to work in a multi- and interdisciplinary team;
willingness to take a team science approach;
willingness to contribute to the further expansion of the Amsterdam Interdisciplinary Center for Higher Education Research (AICHER);
curiosity to learn about diverse perspectives on research into higher education;
interest to learn from different disciplines and building bridges between them;
resilience to cope with challenges that come with new methodological approaches or with the integration of different theoretical perspectives;
motivation to contribute to improving educational practice and informing policy through scientific research;
ability to work independently;
excellent oral and written skills in English.

What else do we offer you

The position concerns temporary employment of 38 hours for a maximum term of 4 years. The initial employment is for one year. Following a positive assessment and barring altered circumstances, this term will be extended by a maximum of 36 months, which should result in the conferral of a doctorate. We will put together a curriculum which will also include the opportunity to attend training courses and both national and international events. For this position, the University Job Classification profile of PhD Candidate (Promovendus) applies.

You will work in this team

One PhD candidate will be based in the Research Institute of Child Development and Education (RICDE) and one in the Psychology Research Institute (PsyRes) of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences; both will become members of the Amsterdam Interdisciplinary Center for Higher Education Research (AICHER). This new institute unites a large group of UvA scholars and support staff (educational scientists, psychologists, economists, sociologists, data scientists, lecturers, educational managers) interested in higher education research, spread across the different faculties and support departments of the University of Amsterdam. Through state-of-the-art fundamental research, our goal is to contribute to evidence-informed guidelines for using institutional data and GenAI to design more equitable and effective assessment practices and learning environments in higher education.

Do you have an interest in education, data science and would you like to contribute to shaping the future of higher education? We are offering two four-year PhD positions for highly motivated and versatile candidates, to be part of an interdisciplinary team science project on employing educational data to answer scientific questions about teaching, learning, and assessment in higher education.

Mixing substantial perspectives and analytics to learn from institutional higher education data

What are you going to do

Perform data curation: Extract, transform, merge, and combine data from the UvA’s many databases.
Use these data to answer scientific questions that relate to learning and assessment.
Integrate multiple perspectives and data science approaches to find solutions for challenges in higher education.
Play an active role in further developing a team science-infrastructure for UvA’s research into higher education, for example by organising seminars related to your research or presenting your research findings to educational policy makers.
Report on the outcomes of your studies in the form of papers that together form a PhD thesis.

What do you have to offer

A finished (research) master’s degree in the social and/or behavioural sciences (or other relevant field) with a strong focus on quantitative methods (i.e., statistics, analytics, or artificial intelligence);
demonstrable skills in programming (e.g., R or Python) and working with large data files;
ability to work in a multi- and interdisciplinary team;
willingness to take a team science approach;
willingness to contribute to the further expansion of the Amsterdam Interdisciplinary Center for Higher Education Research (AICHER);
curiosity to learn about diverse perspectives on research into higher education;
interest to learn from different disciplines and building bridges between them;
resilience to cope with challenges that come with new methodological approaches or with the integration of different theoretical perspectives;
motivation to contribute to improving educational practice and informing policy through scientific research;
ability to work independently;
excellent oral and written skills in English.

What else do we offer you

You will work in this team

If you recognise yourself in this profile and are interested in the role, we look forward to receiving your application. Applications should be submitted as one bundled .pdf that includes:

motivation letter (max. 500 words);
CV, including the names and contact details of two academic references we may contact;
a grade transcript of your graduate program;
a writing sample (e.g. your MSc thesis, a published article, a scientific essay);
a max. 300 word abstract of a research project you would like to undertake on one of the themes mentioned above.

Please upload this package as a single PDF on the next page in the ‘CV’ box.

You can apply via the red button until 7 May 2026. Only complete applications received before this date and submitted via the link below will be considered. The first round of interviews is scheduled to take place in the 2^nd week of May. First-round interviews may take place online if appropriate.

For questions about the vacancy, you can contact:

Hugo van Dam, AICHER community manager: AICHER@uva.nl.

N.B. you can only apply via the red button, applications sent in any other way or after the deadline will not be taken into consideration.

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Two Fully Funded PhD Positions in Educational Data Science