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.