Kristin Gunckel

Dr. Gunckel is a professor of science education in the College of Education. Her expertise is in the area of environmental science literacy. She is known as a leader in designing curriculum materials, pedagogical practices, and assessment to support students in developing model-based understandings of the movement of water through environmental systems. Her scholarship in this area focuses on developing learning progressions for how children’s ideas about water change over time. Dr. Gunckel situates her research in the context of the desert southwest and her projects often include environmental justice and social justice components. Her most current projects include Comp Hydro, which has developed learning progressions and associated assessments and curriculum materials for integrating computational thinking into using and interpreting models of groundwater and surface water systems, and Learning Progressions in Science, for which she is developing learning progressions focused on middle school and high school students understanding of concepts related to the impacts of natural resource use (e.g., water, minerals, fossil fuels) on the environment, argumentation, and finding patterns in data. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation.