Noted Psychologist and Education Professor Dies

Jeanne S. Chall, an influential researcher who for decades was at the forefront of the debate over how people learn to read, died Saturday of heart failure at her Cambridge home. She was 78.

Chall, who retired as a professor of education emeritus in 1991, was one of the first psychologists to talk of reading as a learning process with developmental stages.

She started teaching at the Graduate School of Education in 1965 and in 1966 she established what is now the Harvard Literacy Lab, which trains instructors in how to teach reading.

Colleagues said one of Chall's chief contributions to her field was to urge reading teachers to give elementary school students the most challenging literature possible.

According to Mary E. Curtis, who directs the Center for Special Education at Lesley College, Chall would push teachers to give students books that were beyond their reading level, in order to further their knowledge.

Chall also helped shape one of the most heated arguments in elementary education. Educators have argued for decades about whether children should first learn to generally understand texts that they read or if they should concentrate on phonics, or sounding out words one by one.

Chall weighed in on the discussion in 1967 in her first book, Learning To Read: The Great Debate (1967).

The book compiled evidence from over 100 studies. Her colleagues said it has framed the debate ever since.

In the book, Chall wrote that schools need to teach both meaning and phonics. Despite the changing views about phonics, Chall never changed the conclusion she reached in Learning to Read, said Lecturer on Education John D. Strucker '66.

He said a study last year by the National Academy of Sciences arrived at the same conclusion Chall had written of over 30 years earlier.

Her later book, Stages of Reading Development (1983), described how the task of reading itself changes and gets harder as children grow up.

According to her theory, when children first learn to read, they are reading simply to learn, focusing on "decoding" one word at a time.

In the second and third grades, most students acquire "fluency," meaning they decode the words more quickly.

By the fourth grade, Chall argued, students normally read to learn vocabulary and content.

These stages also apply to illiterate adults, said Strucker.

Lecturer on Education Vicki A. Jacobs, who co-authored with Chall The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind (1990), said Chall constantly applied her research to her work with the literacy lab.

"She was always concerned with helping students learn," she said.

In The Reading Crisis, Chall and Jacobs wrote that students whose families do not challenge them to read more complex books depend increasingly on their teachers through elementary school.

Strucker said Chall believed children must learn from their own errors--not solely from their teachers. She would put this theory into practice in her own interactions with children.

When a child made an error, "she would just tap her pencil on the table a couple of times," he said.

Upon her retirement in 1991, Chall donated her 9,500-volume collection of books on reading, scholarly studies and popular books to the Gutman Education Library.

Until about a year ago, Chall continued to visit campus regularly to research, teach and write. About two weeks ago, she finished editing her final work, a retrospective on trends in reading education. It will be published in February.

Born in Poland, Chall moved to New York at seven, speaking only Yiddish. She learned English and over the next few years taught her parents how to read in English.

She is survived by three sisters and seven nieces and nephews. A memorial service at Harvard is planned for next spring.