Robert Wood (psychologist)
Robert Wood is a British psychologist and writer. He was born March 10 1941 in Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, of an English father and a Welsh mother and raised in Sunderland. In September 1959 he went up to the University of Nottingham where he studied Mathematics and Statistics. On finishing, he commenced training to be an actuary and worked for short spells as a supply teacher, and as a statistician with Tate & Lyle. He subsequently secured a post at the National Foundation for Educational Research beginning October 1964. There he advanced earlier American work on item characteristic curve theory and did pioneering work in a new subject called item banking, resulting in his first book Item Banking, published in 1969. He then went for graduate training at the University of Chicago, and received a Ph.D in psychometrics in 1971.
Returning to the UK in July 1971 he took up the position of Director of Research in the University of London School Examinations Department; in 1980 he was seconded to direct the Evaluation of Testing in Schools Project at the Institute of Education, also in the University of London. In 1981 he moved to Jamaica where he served as Professor of Educational Measurement in the University of the West Indies. In early 1984 he again moved, to a Fellowship at the Flinders University of South Australia and was appointed to be Director of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Returning to the UK to prepare for the move he became frustrated by the emergence of internal opposition to his appointment and in March 1985 declared his intention not to take up post.
Having become an Associate of the British Psychological Society during the 1970s, and thus qualified to seek work as an occupational psychologist, he became a full-time consultant helping, in 1985, to establish Psychometric Research & Development Ltd. In 1986 he was made a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and for the academic year 1987-88 he was Visiting Professor at the London Institute. In 1990 he joined Pearn Kandola Occupational Psychologists in Oxford. From 1998 to 2005 he was a Special Professor in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham. In 1998 the same university conferred on him the degree of DLitt in recognition of over 120 published books, monographs and articles including Assessment and Testing (Cambridge University Press) and Competency-Based Recruitment and Selection (Wiley). A partner at Pearn Kandola from 1993, he left in March 2000.
Married with two daughters and five grandchildren, his memoir Mackem Mayhem appeared in 2004. That was followed, in 2005, 2006 and 2007, by three novels – Pushing Envelopes, Chekyll and Ide, and Ten a Penny - comprising the Moving Deckchairs trilogy. In early 2007 he started writing short stories, achieving recognition quite quickly with six stories - four top 30 finishes in five Secret Attic competitions and a Highly Commended and Commended in one of the Twisted Tongue flash fiction competitions. He is now writing walking books, starting with a collection of walks entitled Walks into History: Hampshire.