# Constance Steinkuehler

Constance Steinkuehler (Squire) is an American professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before taking public service leave, from 2011-2012, to work as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House Executive Office, where she advised on policy matters about video games and digital media. After returning to academics, she and her partner Dr. Kurt Squire moved to University of California, Irvine where they continue to co-direct the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center today.
Steinkuehler researches cognition, culture, and learning in multiplayer online video games. She is the Co-Director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center at UCI where she teaches courses on games and society, games as social platforms, research methods, and visual design. Her recent projects include mixed methods research on toxicity and extremism among adolescents in online games, teen reasoning about online disinformation, and cross-domain reviews of the impact of game innovations on adjacent and distal fields. She has published over 150 articles and book chapters including five special journal issues and two books.

## Education

Steinkuehler graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri with three bachelor's degrees (Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies) in 1993. She earned a master of science degree in educational psychology with a focus on cognitive science in 2000 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2005 she received her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction studies, also from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her doctoral thesis entitled "Cognition & Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games" was a cognitive ethnography of the games Lineage (I and II) and World of Warcraft.

## Professional career
### Research

After earning her doctorate, Steinkuehler joined the faculty at University of Wisconsin as an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction where she taught classes on videogames and learning and research methods for online communities.
From 2005 to 2013, Steinkuehler's research team of graduate and undergraduate students conducted empirical investigations into multiple academic forms of thinking and learning in the context of online gameplay, including scientific reasoning, literacy, mathematical reasoning, and problem-solving. Focusing primarily on game communities and fandoms, they took a sociocultural approach to their research, using mixed methods, including ethnographic work and experimental research.
From 2007 to 2009, Steinkuehler ran an after-school games-based program for teens who were avid gamers but disengaged in school. The goal of this work was to better understand the links (or lack thereof) between learning in online games versus school. This body of work included analysis of the nature, function, and quality of texts that are a regular part of online gaming, how reading performance of adolescents on such game-related texts compares to performance on school-related texts, and the factors that contribute to such differences (e.g., prior knowledge, strategy, persistence, choice).
After a period working in the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology, Steinkuehler returned to academic research with a new focus on field-building efforts. Research projects during this period (2012-2016) include collaborations with Dr. Richard Davidson through the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds on the design and testing of games for emotional acuity and self-regulation as well as cross-institutional efforts to situate big data (combining telemetry game data exhaust with conversational utterances across small groups of middle school game players) to better understand collaborative learning through game-based interventions.
In 2017, Steinkuehler and her partner Dr. Kurt Squire moved to the Department of Informatic] at University of California, Irvine and re-established the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center as part of the trans-departmental Connected Learning Lab at UCI.

## Personal life

Steinkuehler is married to Kurt Squire, former Creative Director at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, and also a professor at University of California, Irvine.
She appeared in a pilot TV show called Brain Trust. The show was piloted in 2008 and featured a team of thought leaders working collaboratively to solve seemingly unsolvable problems.