Gina Biancarosa is the Ann Swindells Chair in Education and a full professor in the Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. She also retains a courtesy appointment in the Quantitative Research Methods in Education PhD program. Biancarosa currently serves on the UO Institutional Review Board. She conducts her research at the Center on Teaching and Learning.

Biancarosa’s research centers on questions related to more precise and informative measurement of reading, especially of reading comprehension, and modeling of growth in reading over time. To date, she has led the development of MOCCA, a diagnostic measure of cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension for Grades 3-5, and DIBELS 8th Edition, which now covers kindergarten through eighth grade and offers better precision and more information for teachers than previous editions. Biancarosa’s research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Educational Measurement, Educational and Psychological Measurement, Assessment for Effective Intervention, Journal of School Psychology, Reading and Writing, Learning and Individual Differences, and Elementary School Journal. She serves as an Associate Editor of the British Journal of Educational Psychology, on the editorial boards of Educational Assessment, Elementary School Journal, and Reading Research Quarterly, and has served as a reading, adolescent literacy, and applied measurement expert on several review panels, including panels for IES, NAEP, PISA, and the Oregon Department of Education.

Before coming to UO, she was a reading specialist and after-school teacher in Massachusetts and completed her Master’s and Doctoral studies in Language and Literacy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She also completed a three-year Institute of Education Sciences (IES) sponsored post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University. She has received over $8 million in external funding for her research from IES, the Spencer Foundation, the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, as well as over $100,000 in internal funding for curricular and research endeavors at UO. Biancarosa regularly teaches courses on measurement and assessment and applied statistics, as well as occasional courses on reading theory and methods.

This faculty member is interested in having a new doctoral student for the 2025-2026 academic year.