Gale Sinatra
Gale M. Sinatra is an American educational psychologist who studies how people learn science, stay motivated, and change their minds about scientific ideas. She is known for helping develop the conceptual change learning model and for her work on climate science education and increasing public interest in science. She holds the Stephen H. Crocker Chair of Education and is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC). Sinatra also leads the APA Climate Change Task Force and has served as President and Editor of APA’s Division 15 journal, Educational Psychology. In 2022 she was elected a member of the National Academy of Education, recognizing her impact on policy and practice.
Sinatra earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) in 1981, where she was president of Psi Chi, the psychology honor society. She helped coordinate UMass’s National Evaluation System, which developed teacher certification exams. She continued at UMass to earn a Master of Science and a PhD in Psychology with a minor in Educational Measurement in 1989. Her doctoral work, supervised by James M. Royer, focused on the effectiveness of a computer-based reading assessment system. After a postdoctoral period with Isabel Beck at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center, Sinatra began her faculty career.
From 1991 to 2000, she was at the University of Utah as an associate professor in Educational Psychology, where she received a starter grant for decoding instruction techniques and led the Utah Reading Center. In 2000 she moved to UNLV as an associate research professor and later became a full professor in 2005. There she led research on how people learn and teach biological evolution, becoming the first College of Education faculty member there to receive an NSF Synthesis Grant. She spent 2011 as a visiting professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education and was promoted to full professor in 2012, became Associate Dean for Research in 2016, and was named Distinguished Professor in 2024.
At USC Sinatra directs the Motivated Change Research Lab, which studies how cognition and motivation influence learning in STEM, climate science, and evolution education. The lab has earned the USC Rossier School of Education Excellence in Research Award for its work. She has spoken at major conferences and published widely in educational psychology and science education. In 2023 she co-authored Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It with Barbara Hofer of Middlebury College (Oxford University Press).
Sinatra’s work also includes influential books and chapters, such as the APA Educational Psychology Handbook (Vol. 1, 2012) and Intentional Conceptual Change (2003). A central thread of her research is student engagement in STEM—how students come to care about science and persist in learning. She has argued that engagement is complex and overlaps across cognitive, behavioral, and emotional domains, with motivation and positive emotion playing key roles in deep learning and conceptual change.
Beyond the classroom, Sinatra has collaborated with Hofer on public understanding of science, arguing that distrust often grows when scientists do not communicate clearly or when media present limited evidence. She supports policies like the Next Generation Science Standards to help people learn “how to think” about science. She emphasizes that scientists, educators, and psychologists should work together to understand audiences and improve science communication, acknowledging uncertainties and the theories behind scientific ideas.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 03:32 (CET).