Robert Wood (psychologist)

Dr 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. After a grammar school education he went up to the University of Nottingham in September 1959 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 conducted the first study of a new topic called item banking, resulting in his first book Item Banking. He then went to study at the University of Chicago, and received a Ph.D 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 where he consolidated his reputation as a leading psychometrician by, for instance, organising a conference called Rehabilitating psychometrics for the Social Science Research Council. That was in 1979. 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. The following year he moved to Jamaica where he served as Professor of Educational Measurement in the University of the West Indies. In early 1984 he took up a Fellowship at Flinders University in Australia and later in the year was appointed to be Director of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research but declined to take up post citing personal reasons.

Having become an Associate of the British Psychological Society during the 1970s, and thus qualified to seek work as a psychologist, he became a full-time business psychologist helping, in 1985, to establish Psychometric Research & Development Ltd in St Albans. 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. A partner at Pearn Kandola from 1993 onwards, he decided, in March 2000, to continue as a freelance.

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 comprising the Moving Deckchairs trilogy. In early 2007 he started writing short stories and is now busy on a walking book called Walks into History: Hampshire to be published by Countryside Books.

References

• Wood, Robert (with L S Skurnik); Item Banking; Windsor: NFER-Nelson, 1969 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-0901225108) [1]
• Wood, Robert; Measurement and Assessment in Education and Psychology: Collected Papers 1967-87; Lewes: Falmer Press, 1987 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1850001621) [2]
• Wood, Robert; Assessment and Testing: A Survey of Research, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-0521449977) [3]
• Wood, Robert (with T Payne); Competency-based Recruitment and Selection, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1998 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-0471974734) [4]
• Wood, Robert (with H Tolley); Test Your Emotional Intelligence, London: Kogan Page Ltd, 2003 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-0749437329) [5]
• Wood, Robert; Mackem Mayhem; Leicester: Matador, 2004 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1904744603)[6]
• Wood, Robert; Pushing Envelopes, Leicester: Matador, 2005 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1905237029) [7]
• Wood, Robert; Chekyll and Ide, Leicester: Matador, 2006 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1905886203) [8]
• Wood, Robert; Ten a Penny, Leicester: Matador, 2007 (Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1906221287) [9]