After months of battling numerous health complications, William D. Rohwer, Jr. passed away on June 26, 2016, with loved ones by his side. He was 78. Born in Denver, Colorado, to Dan and Gladys Rohwer, Bill was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He became a professor in UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education in 1964 and served as its Dean from 1989 until he retired in 1996. He was a Fellow of APA’s Division 15 and a long-time member of Division C of the American Educational Research Association.
Bill rose to prominence as an educational psychology scholar and researcher during the 1960s and throughout the next three decades. He was one of the early pioneers to transition his learning-and-memory strategy research from the then-dominant S-R characterization of human information processing to the “cognitive revolution” perspective that was emerging at the time. Applying his rigorous experimental psychology training, his focus on beneficial ways of presenting, organizing, and reorganizing to-be-processed material – which he termed verbal and pictorial “elaboration” ‒ led to contrastive studies of efficient and inefficient learners, including those differentiated on the basis of age, social class, and mental ability. A major successful application of Bill’s research investigations was his development of powerful instructional techniques that served to mitigate such seemingly immutable differences. Bill’s elaboration concept spawned numerous replications and extensions of his findings for years to come. The implications of his work have had a profound influence on educational psychologists and educators with interests in the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of effective study strategies and skills. The impact of his publications is no less relevant in the present day, as manifested in such areas as the scientific study of academic study skills, goals of early childhood education, student diversity, educational inequality, and boosting achievement through interventions in the adolescent years.
Chief among Bill’s interpersonal traits was his commitment to the betterment of his graduate students’ scholarship. He was not just a mentor. He was a true friend to all, never critical, ever encouraging and complimentary, always focusing on students’ strengths. His style of mentoring was friendly and supportive but sufficiently flexible to allow for diversity of approaches and questions. His securing of grants and his extensive publication record provided the perfect model for what his students needed to do to have productive careers. For years, one of Bill’s students carried this Goethe quote in his wallet: “When we treat a man as he is, we make him worse than he is. When we treat him as if he was what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.” The second sentence of the quote perfectly captures the way in which Bill treated all of his student disciples. In short, Bill was adored by all of his former students and his legacy lives on both in their memory and in the careful, caring manner in which they mentor their own students.
Bill’s graduate students were most impressed by his ability to produce a complete, perfectly composed, scientific journal article in one sitting, without an outline or draft. Bill had many other extraordinary talents beyond those directly related to research and teaching: He was able to master novel computer applications, such as Excel, in rapid fashion; he could identify any wine in a blind tasting; and he (along with wife Carol) could produce a detailed Michelin-like guide to scores of restaurants throughout Italy.
Bill Rohwer will be sorely missed by those who knew and loved him. Many other educational psychology scholars will follow, but few will lead as he did.