S5E4: What’s in a Job Talk?

Job Talks, they’re different from conference talks! Here, Jess and Sara talk about what we think is the most successful structure for a job talk; what to include and how long to spend in each area. We describe the purpose of this talk, and what you should think about when writing one. We provide some of our favorite tips for getting the talk ready to present. Hint: practice, practice, practice!Email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer. Recorded November 23, 2026

One question Jess and Sara get a lot is whether doing a postdoc is a good idea. Here, we talk about what a postdoc is, how long it lasts, and what kinds of jobs a postdoc can take on. We also describe what we see as the advantages and disadvantages of the position. We talk a bit about our past times as post docs, and what kinds of things you can do when you are there, and what kinds of grants are available just for you if you decide to go for it. In this episode, we mention this nice resource for postdocs:https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/postdoc-guide Email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer.

Well 2025 was a year with lots of uncertainty. Jess and Sara talk about how the funding landscape has changed for us, how it has changed our work, and how we are handling it (hint: it’s not great!). We go through ideas of how to pivot your work when there may not be new funding, and describe kinds of projects you can do with minimal outside funding. We expect that academia is going to be a bit different for a while, so we talk about how we can be thoughtful about that in applying for jobs, mentoring, and reviewing our colleagues. We may all need to stare out some windows for a while. A recent data sharing paper with repository resources! https://doi.org/10.25894/rise.2604. Email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer.Episode recorded 09/06/2025

No, you’re not having deja vu. It’s a different kind of two part episode, one that is two and a half years in the making. Sara has moved to a new institution! And just to one up Jess, she has also moved to a new country! Listen to hear her talk about what it’s like to move institutions as a (ahem) senior professor. What kinds of things do you have to think about across research, teaching, and service as you’re deciding whether to and eventually planning for a move. And what do you do about email? Well, some of us made smarter choices than others. Email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer.Recorded 11/30/2024

It’s no mystery that research papers are essential for academic work. What IS a mystery is how to figure out who should be an author on those academic papers and how to have conversions about it. In this episode, Jess and Sara go over some authorship roles, guidelines and rules that govern authorship in the field, and talk about different ideas of determining order of authorship. This episode was recorded live at the Emerging Perspectives on Early STEM Learning, Development, and Education Workshop hosted by Purdue's Center for Early Learning.   In this episode we mention:  APA Standards for authorship. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE),  The 14 CRediT authorship roles:  https://credit.niso.org  The Authorship Project: https://repository.charlotte.edu/islandora/object/work%3A921  Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Follow Dr. Hart on twitter @Saraannhart Follow Dr. Logan on twitter @Jarlogan. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer. This episode was recorded October 19, 2023.

In this episode, Jess and Sara reckon with what the preregistration revolution means in developmental science. We first visited preregistration and registered reports in Season 3. Since then, we’ve been a part of many preregistrations and registered reports, and have reviewed and handled them as editors. Through that process, we’ve noticed that questions often come up about whether something is really a preregistration and whether some studies or analyses can or should be preregistered.  We mention:  Several definitions: Open Science Framework:  “Preregistration is the practice of documenting your research plan at the beginning of your study and storing that plan in a read-only public repository”. APA: “Preregistration allows researchers to specify and share the details of their research in a public registry before conducting the study.” IES - no definition, just that you should do it; it’s part of the SEER standards.  REES similarly just says “REES is designed to increase transparency of and access to information about both ongoing and completed efficacy and effectiveness studies.” Even the preregistration revolution article doesn’t include a definition. The closest it gets (about ⅓ of the way through the article is “Preregistration of an analysis plan is committing to analytic steps without advance knowledge of the research outcomes.”  Paper about preregistering exploratory analyses: Compares it to a funded sea voyage:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7098547/  Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Follow Dr. Hart on twitter @Saraannhart Follow Dr. Logan on twitter @Jarlogan. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer. This episode was recorded 9/10/2023.

What can we say about the often used and often confused statistical approach that is moderation? Quite a lot actually. In this episode Jess and Sara introduce the basics of moderation (aka statistical interactions) using absolutely no math (or very nearly absolutely no math). Listen to get a primer on the kinds of questions you can ask with moderation, and to get answers to common moderation questions like: Why is my interaction negative if my main effect is positive? Can I interpret the man effect if the interaction is significant? Why is my interaction significant if my main effect isn’t? And how do I graph the result when I have continuous variables?  (see the figure Sara is talking through on our website: http://www.withinandbetweenpod.com/) Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Follow Dr. Hart on twitter @Saraannhart Follow Dr. Logan on twitter @Jarlogan. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer. Recorded August 5, 2023.

Related to this podcast's interests in data sharing, this week Jess and Sara talk about common data elements initiatives. These are movements that are hoping to get all of the researchers in the same field or subfield to agree to a given set of assessments, measures, procedures, and/or reporting metrics (Think: Everyone who measures mother’s education would ask the same stem question with the same eight category responses, which would be coded and reported in the same way).  We’ll talk about different types of initiatives, the reasons why proponents think it’s a great idea, and what major concerns might come up. Sara also gives us a mini lecture introducing genome-wide association studies. Trust us, it’s related!  In this episode, we talk about:  The NIH Common Data Elements Program: https://heal.nih.gov/data/common-data-elements  NIH Common Measures website: https://www.phenxtoolkit.org/  A paper about the NIMH common data elements: Barch, D. M., Gotlib, I. H., Bilder, R. M., Pine, D. S., Smoller, J. W., Brown, C. H., ... & Farber, G. K. (2016). Common measures for National Institute of Mental Health funded research. Biological Psychiatry, 79(12), e91-e96. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968690/ What’s the difference between common measures and common metrics:  de Beurs, E., Boehnke, J. R., & Fried, E. I. (2022). Common measures or common metrics? A plea to harmonize measurement results. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 29(5), 1755-1767. Paper describing the openly available Project KIDS data: Van Dijk, W., Norris, C. U., Al Otaiba, S., Schatschneider, C., & Hart, S. A. (2022). Exploring individual differences in response to reading intervention: Data from Project KIDS (Kids and Individual Differences in Schools). Journal of Open Psychology Data, 10(1). Educational attainment GWAS paper data harmonization appendix: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41588-022-01016-z/MediaObjects/41588_2022_1016_MOESM1_ESM.pdf   Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Follow Dr. Hart on twitter @Saraannhart Follow Dr. Logan on twitter @Jarlogan. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer. Recorded July 9, 2023.

Measuring change is our first ever LIVE EPISODE! Recorded at the Association for Psychological Science conference with a live conference audience! Over here in the developmental sciences, we are often trying to measure or predict how much people grow and change over time. To do that, we’ll sometimes measure a skill or ability twice (for kids, maybe that’s once near the beginning of the school year and once at the end of the school year). In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about options for statistically modeling and predicting change between two timepoints. We talk about two basic models: the simple difference scores and residualized gain scores, explain why we can’t just measure people at post test, and conclude that the question is important in making your decision. Have a listen as we get to take some related questions from the audience.  Things we mentioned:  If you are working in the latent space and have a measurement model at each time point, you may need to establish measurement invariance across time. To do so, you can follow steps in Brown (2015; pp. 259–265).  Brown, T. A. (2015). Confirmatory factor analysis for applied research (2nd ed.). Guilford Publications. Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Follow Dr. Hart on twitter @Saraannhart Follow Dr. Logan on twitter @Jarlogan. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer. Recorded May 27th, 2023.

Mediation models! At their core, mediation models explore the relations among three variables: A predictor, an outcome, and a secret third thing they call a Mediator. You’ve probably seen mediation models out there in the published literature, with folks testing paths, seeing if a relation is still there if a mediator is involved, or testing for an “indirect effect”. Jess and Sara talk about all of this in this episode. What is mediation, what kinds of questions can you ask with it, and why are people so mad about it? Jess and Sara go over the basics of this method, including a few examples, and talk a bit about the controversies surrounding it.  A link to Barron and Kenny’s Mediation paper  A link to MacKinnon’s paper on Mediation analysis  Some information on the PROCESS macros we mentioned.  A link to the paper Jess mentioned on reading and math language.  A link to the paper Sara mentioned on the home math environment.   Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at WithinandBetweenPod.com. Follow Dr. Hart on twitter @Saraannhart Follow Dr. Logan on twitter @Jarlogan. Our theme music was composed by Jason Flowers. Our logo was created by Nathan Archer. Recorded May 13th, 2023.