Eric Lunzer
Mapperley branch member
born August 8 1923; died May 2 2005
Taken from the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1488040,00.html
Obituary
Eric Lunzer Innovative developmental psychologist Colin Harrison Friday May 20, 2005 The Guardian Eric Lunzer, who has died aged 81, was one of the most important developmental psychologists of his generation. Professor of educational psychology at Nottingham University (1969-85), he was a polymath: he won a scholarship to study Latin at Oxford, became a captain in military intelligence, a psychologist, expert computer programmer, internationally respected reading specialist and mathematics educator. In his final year, he had a paper published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, and at the time of his death was working on a major book on cognition and communication in art.
Eric was born inNew York, but soon his father, who was in the diamond business, took the family toAntwerp. By 1933, when the family moved toLondon, Eric was bilingual in French and English. After attendingUniversityCollegeschool, he won an open scholarship toWadhamCollege,Oxford, to read greats, and he never lost his love of classics.
The second world war interrupted his studies, and when he returned to Oxford, he graduated in politics, philosophy and psychology, excelling in philosophy as well as psychology. Eric met his wife Kay at a Communist party meeting in Oxford, and they married in 1950. Later he joined the Labour party, but never wavered in his strongly held socialist beliefs.
After a period teaching in secondary schools, he gained his PhD from Birmingham University, then began postdoctoral work with the renowned developmental psychologist Jean Piaget in Geneva. Few of Piaget's works had been translated at this point, and Eric worked on translations of a number of them, including The Child's Conception Of Geometry and The Early Growth Of Logic In The Child. A firm friendship developed that continued until Piaget's death in 1980.
In 1957, Eric returned to an academic career in England, first at Manchester University, where he wrote his seminal book, The Regulation Of Behaviour (1968). In 1969, he was appointed to the chair of educational psychology at Nottingham, and embarked on a major research project on "operativity", developing an extensive battery of tests of cognitive functioning among five-year-old children.
In the early 1970s, the data from these studies led to a number of scholarly battles around the interpretation of Piaget's theories, not least with Peter Bryant, now Watts professor of psychology at Oxford.
During the 1970s, as his three daughters moved through secondary school, Eric became increasingly interested in reading development and comprehension, and led (with special needs expert Keith Gardner), the very influential Schools Council effective use of reading project. The project, and the Directed Activities Related to Texts (DARTs) that came out of it, established his reputation as a curriculum innovator, as well as a researcher. DARTs activities, further developed in the book Learning From The Written Word (1984), became an internationally respected toolkit for supporting reading development across the curriculum, and are woven into the current DfES materials to support teaching in English, maths and science.
After his retirement in 1985, Eric continued to work on a number of research projects. His most significant contribution was to the DfES/Becta ImpaCT2 evaluation, a national study completed in 2002 of the impact of information technology on achievement in English schools, on which he was chief statistician.
Eric had the restless mind of a true philosopher. He would sometimes take 25 minutes to answer an apparently simple question, and would often start a sentence in which the subject was maddeningly distant from the predicate. But he could also be wonderfully lucid and profound, and his definition of comprehension as "the willingness and ability to reflect on what is read" is still widely quoted, and continues to generate new research.
Kay and their three daughters survive him.
· Eric Anthony Lunzer, developmental psychologist, born August 8 1923; died May 2 2005
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