Elfrieda H. Hiebert

Elfrieda “Freddy” H. Hiebert is president and CEO of TextProject, a nonprofit that provides open-access resources to support higher reading levels, and a research associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Hiebert received her Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has worked in the field of early reading acquisition for over 45 years, first as a teacher’s aide and teacher of primary-level students in California and, subsequently, as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado–Boulder, Michigan, and California–Berkeley. Her research addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts. Dr. Hiebert’s research has been published in numerous scholarly journals. She has also authored or edited ten books. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers (Center for the Study of Reading, 1985) and Every Child a Reader (Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, 1999), she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. Dr. Hiebert’s model of accessible texts for beginning and struggling readers—TExT—has been used to develop numerous reading programs that are widely used in schools. Dr. Hiebert was the 2008 recipient of the William S. Gray Citation of Merit (awarded by the International Reading Association). She is also a member of the Reading Hall of Fame, a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and the 2013 recipient of the American Educational Research Association’s Research to Practice (Interpretive) award. Hiebert chaired an advisory group on early childhood for the Common Core and serves on the Item Quality Review Panel of Smarter Balanced.