William W. “Bill” Cooley, professor emeritus in the School of Medicine and an early co-director of the Learning Research and Development Center, died July 17, 2024, at 94.
Cooley created a strong psychometric team within the LRDC — faculty focused on accurately measuring how students learn — recalled retired LRDC senior scientist and former School of Education Dean Alan Lesgold. “And that was where his strengths lay,” Lesgold said.
“If you look at the whole pattern of how we decide whether something we’ve proposed should happen in schools really works, the group Bill assembled has done as much as anybody to make that an enterprise that actually does any good,” he added.
Most proposed educational reforms can be shown to work a little, somewhere, he pointed out. However, “in education, for the longest time, has been the belief that if you just came up with this magic pill that works for everyone,” all schools could adopt it. The real challenge, he said, is figuring out what can work for the majority of students, “and that challenge is what Bill’s group worked on. He worked to help us understand the full complexity” of the issue.
Thanks to Cooley, “the School of Education ended up with a strong educational measurement group,” concerned with learning outcomes and factors in classrooms that influenced which students benefited from which educational efforts.
Lesgold remembered the time in 1987 when Cooley returned from a stint as dean of Pitt’s Semester-at-Sea program, which took students around the world on a ship called the Universe, and fellow faculty welcomed Cooley back with a sign that read “Dean of the Universe.”
“He was a great person — his colleagues loved him,” Lesgold said. “His thinking influenced me, and he was a major influence in educational research.”
Born and raised in West Bend, Wisc., Cooley earned his bachelor of science degree from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisc., and his master of arts from the University of Minnesota. He began his academic career with a year of teaching at Mid-Pacific Institute in Hawaii, then pursued his Ed.D. at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was hired there as an assistant professor, teaching courses in computer applications and statistical methods as used in educational research. In the early 1960s, he joined Pitt to direct Project Talent, a national study of high-school students, remaining here until his 1998 retirement.
He published five books, more than 20 book chapters and many journal articles. He was the co-director of the LRDC for eight years and served as president of the American Educational Research Association. His spent sabbatical years in Australia and Palo Alto.
He was the husband of Cynthia for 69 years, father of Warren (Anita Klein) and Robin (Jennifer Sanders), and grandfather of Megan Cooley-Klein (Matt Desrochers), Michelle Cooley-Klein (Emily Winner) and Olivia Kelly.
Memorial contributions are suggested to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, pittsburghsymphony.org.
— Marty Levine