My mother-in-law, Elizabeth Goodacre, known to her family and friends as Beth, who has died aged 87, was a leading researcher in the field of teaching children to read.

Her early books included Reading in Infant Classes (1967), Teachers and Their Pupils’ Home Backgrounds (1968), School and Home (1970) and Children and Learning to Read (1971). She was an adviser to the BBC series for young readers Words and Pictures and researched the major impact that teachers’ expectations based on pupils’ home background had on the children’s achievements, a phenomenon that perpetuated disadvantage.

She was born in Sydney, Australia, to Will Standish, who had worked in the timber industry, and Josephine Anderson, an ABC radio presenter. Beth was an only child, arriving unexpectedly after 22 years of marriage. Her father died when she was eight and her mother when she was 18. She trained as a teacher and, like many young Australians in the postwar period, took up the opportunity to travel to the “mother country” in 1951.

As a result of taking up amateur dramatics, she met David Goodacre, whom she married in 1960. He was an architect whose designs included the family home in Cuffley, Hertfordshire. Beth combined raising three children with an academic career in educational psychology at the National Foundation for Educational Research. A Labour supporter, she stood in local council elections in the staunchly Conservative Northaw and Cuffley ward.

In 1973 she was appointed principal lecturer in education at Trent Park College of Education, shortly before it merged with Middlesex Polytechnic in 1974 (becoming Middlesex University in 1992). She was promoted to a chair in education in the 1980s and became head of department in 1990, retiring in 1994.

Beth revisited her homeland in the 90s, initially as an invited speaker at a teacher training conference at the University of Western Sydney, later to do field work for a book, Living the Past: Reconstruction, Recreation, Re-enactment and Education at Museums and Historical Sites, written with Gavin Baldwin and published in 2002. In the intervening years, she retained her Australian nationality and consistently failed the “Tebbit test” of loyalty to her adopted country by supporting the Australian cricket team.

David died in 2003. Beth is survived by their children, Kate, Steve and Sarah, and grandchildren, Molly and Harry.