Kamil Hankour is a Visiting Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Educational, School & Counseling Psychology at the University of Missouri. He earned his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2026.

His research centers on student engagement, with a focus on how classroom discourse can expand students’ opportunities to engage meaningfully in science learning. Dr. Hankour works in elementary and middle school classrooms, where he studies how students participate and how discourse spaces, both between teachers and students and among peers, shape and are shaped by classroom, group, and individual factors. He also investigates innovative methods for studying classroom discourse and engagement, including natural language processing and related computational methods.

He currently serves as project manager for Hybrid²: Creating Equitable Spaces for Science Discourse in Blended Learning Environments, an IES-funded project led by Dr. Kui Xie that examines how the purposeful integration of locally and culturally relevant phenomena with digital technologies can support engaging, discourse-rich learning in middle school science classrooms.

Areas of Expertise

• Classroom discourse
• Student engagement
• Middle and elementary school science
• Natural language processing