Jeanne Chall

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Jeanne Sternlicht Chall (January 1, 1921 – November 27, 1999), a Harvard Graduate School of Education psychologist, writer, and literacy researcher for over 50 years, believed in the importance of direct, systematic instruction in reading in spite of other reading trends throughout her career.

Chall became deeply committed to teaching, to the importance of children's successful reading acquisition and the need to address failing readers, to the power of research to answer practical questions, and to the merit of understanding the historical background of research questions. Though her views were often controversial, she was respected by her peers for the meticulous research. Her conclusions about the best way to approach beginning reading were unpopular when she first presented them, though they have subsequently gained acceptance in the literacy community. Chall's professional life was committed to children's successful reading acquisition, especially low S.E.S. (socioeconomic status) children's. She was also committed to finding answers to failure among readers. She responded to the national concern over why many children were not learning to read well, made popular by Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read, by writing Learning to Read: The Great Debate.^[1] She and Edgar Dale also developed a formula, the Dale-Chall Readability Formula, in 1948 which was considered the most valid and reliable of its kind for determining the readability of texts for several decades. In 1983, Chall added Stages of Reading Development to her literacy contributions. Later, in 1996, she and three of her graduate students developed the Qualitative Assessment of Text Difficulty: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Writers.

Chall retired from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1991. She died at 78 in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 27, 1999.^[2]