Rhonda Nese, College of Education

Rhonda Nese

Rhonda Nese

Associate Professor, Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences
rnese@uoregon.edu
Practice Areas: School Discipline, Bullying and Harassment Prevention, Alternatives to Exclusionary Discipline, Impact of Implicit Biases on Racial Disproportionality in School Discipline

Faculty bio | 541-346-3536

Rhonda Nese is an academic expert in alternatives to exclusionary discipline and other strategies for disrupting the school to prison pipeline. She is a principal investigator within Educational and Community Supports, a research unit housed in the College of Education. Nese’s research involves equitable intervention delivery within a multi-tiered behavior support framework focused on preventative strategies for improving student outcomes. She brings a great deal of expertise as it relates to training teachers and administrators on equitable and feasible instructional practices, systems change, and policy implementation to support their community of learners. Nese currently serves as the director of an IES grant to refine and test an intervention to reduce exclusionary discipline practices, improve student-teacher relationships, and increase instructional time for students in secondary settings, and co-principal investigator on additional federally-funded projects to identify factors that predict implementation and sustainability of evidence-based practices, to develop technology to improve online learning for educators, and to develop and validate an automated scoring system for oral reading fluency. Nese also provides technical assistance to state, district, and school level teams across the nation on preventative practices, including addressing implicit bias in school discipline, effective classroom behavior management strategies, bullying prevention, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline through the OSEP-funded National TA-Center on PBIS. Nese is the recipient of the 2022 Presidential Equity Award from the NorthWest PBIS Network and the 2022 Outstanding Early Career Award from the University of Oregon, the UO’s highest award for early career faculty to recognize and celebrate an emerging and significant record of scholarship and research.

Recent Media:
City Club of Eugene: Implicit Bias: In The Schools, In The Courts, In Society (KLCC, Jan. 11, 2021)
COE researchers developing new assessment for oral reading (Around the O, Sept. 4, 2020)