Pelusa Orellana

This profile was current as of 2024, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Pelusa Orellana, a professor and associate dean of research at the University of the Andes, is the Chilean Visiting Fellow in Democracy and Human Development at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies for the spring 2024 term. Her research focuses on literacy, and her areas of expertise include creating tools to assess aspects of reading, reading motivation, and training of reading teachers. She is the co-creator of Dialect, a platform for evaluating reading skills, and the creator of Leer+, a platform for practicing reading comprehension and vocabulary skills.

During her time at Kellogg, Orellana will work on a research project titled "Examining Public Policy to Guarantee Access to High Quality Literacy Education," where she will examine public policy to promote literacy at the school level in the United States, with the purpose of identifying actions that could be implemented in Chile, to revert the downward trends in reading and writing levels. 

In addition to authoring and editing books and book chapters, Orellana has been published in journals such as Revista Interdisciplinaria, Revista Psykhé, International Journal of Educational Research, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Literacy, among others. Her publications include multicultural studies on reading motivation, research on the relationship between different components of reading, and the importance of the print environment in the development of literacy skills in children. 

Orellana holds a PhD in Early Childhood, Literacy, and Families from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master of Arts in Instructional Leadership from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.