The name Robert is a Germanic given name, from hrod "fame" and beraht "bright". It is also in use as a surname.

After becoming widely used in Continental Europe it entered England in its Old French form Robert, where an Old English cognate form (Hrēodbēorht, Hrodberht, Hrēodbēorð, Hrœdbœrð, Hrœdberð) had existed before the Norman Conquest. The feminine version is Roberta. The Italian form is Roberto.

In Italy during the Second World War, the form of the name, Roberto, briefly acquired a new meaning derived from, and referring to the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.

Jeanne Chall (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.

Born in Poland in 1921, Chall was 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. 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. 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.