Western Oregon University is celebrating a $1.4 million donation from a former Western psychology professor, distinguished education leader Richard Woodcock.

The money, the third biggest donation in university history, will go to help build a new $18 million College of Education building slated to open in fall 2016.

View full sizeRichard W. Woodcock
The regional university, in Monmouth, is striving to do its part to get more Oregonians to earn higher education credentials and to stoke the state economy.

Western already produces
the second largest number of teachers of any Oregon college or university. Approximately 80
percent of Oregon school districts employ one or more Western grades as teachers and administrators, university officials say.

Woodcock's donation will help fund completion of a 58,000-square-foot education center with state-of-the-art teaching tools. It will feature SMART Boards, avatar
simulations, and live-streaming connections with public school classrooms in Salem-Keizer and other nearby  districts. In
addition, the divisions of teacher education, special education and
health and physical education will come together in the new facility to
promote collaboration across disciplines.

The building will be named in honor of Woodcock, who became a familiar name in education circles with the creation of the widely used Woodcock-Johnson Achievement Tests, used to measure an individual's ability to learn reading and math.

Early in his long career, studded with awards, Woodcock served as an assistant professor of psychology and head of the reading clinic at Western, then a teachers college known as Oregon College of Education. Now 86, he lives in San Diego and has a beach home in Canon Beach, public records show.

In a statement released by the university, Woodcock said, "My time as a faculty member at the Oregon College
of Education is among some of the fondest memories of my career. Over the years
since then, I have continued to see the university grow and have been aware of
its expanding academic programs. The university has maintained its mission of
providing quality education on its own campus and across the state. ... I believe my investment
in this facility and its students will have a continuing impact even beyond
Oregon as WOU continues to produce highly effective and inspiring educators."

According to Riverside Publishing, which now owns and distributes the Woodcock-Johnson tests, the exams "reflect the knowledge, skill, and ingenuity of
their senior author, Dr. Richard Woodcock." He earned his doctorate from the University of Oregon.

The publisher says the Woodcock-Johnson
tests "have a distinguished history, with the first edition published
in 1977. Dr. Woodcock began work on this battery of tests in 1963 in a
series of controlled experiments for measuring learning ability. The
first test was visual-auditory learning, which remains an important test for measuring new learning through associative
memory.... The scientific-empirical test development principles
modeled by Dr. Woodcock are now the standard in test development."

Woodcock's high-profile career spans more than five decades. In
1993, he received the senior scientist award from the American
Psychological Association in
recognition of his career contributions to the field of school
psychology.

Woodcock has a wide background in education and
psychology, Riverside says. He served as an elementary teacher, school psychologist,
director of special education, and university professor. At Western from 1957 to 1961, Woodcock was an assistant
professor of psychology and director of the reading clinic. He was an
associate professor of special education at the University of Northern
Colorado from 1961 to 1963. From 1963 to 1968, Dr. Woodcock was a
research professor of special education, senior scientist, and acting
director of the Institute on Mental Retardation and Intellectual
Development at George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. (Mental retardation is no longer an accepted, legitimate term for intellectual disabilities.)

He was
editor and director of research for American Guidance Service from 1968
to 1972. He served as a visiting scholar in special education and
rehabilitation at the University of Arizona, a visiting scholar of
psychology at the University of Southern California, and a research
professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Currently, he
is director of Measurement/Learning/Consultants, a test development
and research organization he founded in 1972.

Dr. Woodcock holds an doctorate of education in psycho-education and
statistics from the University of Oregon. He was a postdoctoral fellow
in neuropsychology at Tufts University School of Medicine.

He co-authored books on measuring human intelligence as recently as 2010.

-- Betsy Hammond