Welcome aboard!

We expect that you will find this work challenging and amply rewarding… and more relevant and appreciated by society than solving crossword puzzles.

We’re thrilled to have you join us!

Retired teachers and professionals are an invaluable resource for  Construct Lab. Our research represents a formidable undertaking –that may take a year or more– and we wouldn’t be able to achieve it without the generous participation of Volunteer Researchers (VRs). Thank you!

In your work of referencing materials for the Constructopedia you are helping to build a truly unique, innovative teaching/learning tool for future generations. We value your skills and commitment!

Work Description and Procedures

Validating a construct as “universal” requires illustrating, by example, that the term is used to explicate other important concepts across a wide range of disciplines and conveys a similar meaning within each area. A construct is validated as “universal” when it is employed across at least 80% of the subject areas of our Matrix.

As a Volunteer Researcher you will help us empirically demonstrate that a construct is indeed universal by helping us populate cells across the Matrix with quality content. Here’s how to do it in five simple steps:

1. Choose one of the constructs in the Matrix available for validation and open it with a click.

2. Find your area(s) of expertise and let the curser hover above it and a bubble will open containing links to illustrative materials –organized under three categories of difficulty: juniors, seniors, and experts.

3. You may add material to the list of links that you think might be more useful.

4. If there are no materials available at a certain level of difficulty you can add some materials there.

5. If the cell reads “no data” then you have hit virgin territory. You can be the first to build that cell.

When you do find interesting materials that are useful to the project you can easily submit up to ten links at a time  by using the the Contact Form. For each entry you submit you will need to include the 1) Construct, 2) Title of the material , 3) URL link to the material, 4) Subject area, and 5) Level of Difficulty e.g., junior, senior, expert. They will be reviewed and  uploaded to the Matrix. You can also use the smaller form on the Contact page for feedback and queries. 

Quality materials

Experienced educators and retired professionals are most qualified to recognize the high quality instructional materials we would like to include in our Construct Lab Matrix. Your selection criteria should include such considerations as:

-Accuracy and timeliness of information

-Appropriate level of difficulty

-Appropriate content for minors

-Length

-Enjoyability

Multimedia resources

These same measures of quality apply to multimedia instructional materials like videos, slideshows and animations. I have found that it is often difficult to locate suitable examples of a construct in text format for “junior” learners. Surprisingly, YouTube is often the best place to start a search for this group of learners.

Acknowledgements

Construct Lab is not able to compensate you for the time and effort you put into this research and development effort. But, if you’re looking to get paid, and you’re aware of funding sources, please feel free to write and submit a grant proposal for yourself, pending our review and approval.

What we can do is show our appreciation. In the near future we will design a special page acknowledging the contributions of our Volunteer Researchers. Your names will appear in groupings of those who have contributed:

-10 or more links

-50 or more links

-100 or more links.

Thank you for your valuable service. We recognize that your content area expertise, professional judgement, and love of learning bring legitimacy this project.

Sincerely,

Milton Adams, Ph.D.

Principal Investigator