Karla Renee Hamlen Mansour

Dr. Karla Hamlen Mansour (Karla R. Hamlen) is a Professor of Research and Assessment in the School of Education and Counseling. She earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the director of the Research in Education and Human Services Master's program and three advanced graduate certificates: Data-Based Decision Making, Program Evaluation in Educational and Youth-Serving Organizations, and Data Analytics in Education. She also teaches quantitative methods and statistics in the doctoral program and serves on dissertation committees. Her passion in teaching is to ensure all are able to understand research studies, particularly as reported in the media, to evaluate claims for themselves. She is also dedicated to helping educators of all types effectively use their data to improve instruction and to effectively communicate data-based findings to stakeholders.

Dr. Hamlen Mansour's research examines learning, problem-solving, and creativity in digital contexts, with particular attention to entertainment video game play as a site for cognitive, social, and motivational development. She studies how engagement with games relates to creative thinking, strategic reasoning, and persistence, and how these skills transfer to educational and real-world problem-solving. Her work also includes computer education research, focusing on how students learn computing concepts, develop digital competencies, and engage with data, analytics, and emerging technologies. Across projects, she emphasizes applied, data-informed approaches that connect research to educational practice and learning design.