James (Jay) Charles Powell

JAMES (JAY) CHARLES POWELL
Age 86, on July 3, 2018. Beloved son of Edgar Earnest Powell, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer and also a health inspector, and Hazel Fern Alcorn Powell, an elementary school teacher, brother of Grace Powell, husband of Valerie Powell. Born on November 18, 1931, in Edmonton, Alberta, Jay was a veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN). From a difficult path as a dyslexic child through elementary and secondary education, Jay eventually earned a Ph.D. with a focus on educational assessment and statistics at the University of Alberta (as well as other degrees and a diplomate.) For many years he taught as a professor at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. Jay passed peacefully on July 3, 2018.
Jay's life represents more than a half century of teaching and research in which he sought to describe and demonstrate ways to improve education. According to Jay, today's education is hampered by an inadequate feedback system that ignores the nature of students' mistakes when tests are scored "right/wrong." He details a different way to teach and carry out assessment that can turn "followers into leaders." Jay described how students' answer selections reveal modes of thinking. He felt teachers need this information about student thought to help learners think more effectively. Jay emphasized that educators should be getting students to "think their way into knowledge" so that their insightful thinking creates their understanding, with teachers provoking learning and not just delivering information to remember.
In a family move for a few years to Bermuda, where both Jay and his sister Grace had to maintain educational progress in the highly-rated Alberta educational system through distance learning, Jay felt that he had to "learn how to learn." Jay often said that a teacher should be not be a "sage on the stage, but a guide by the side." The difference between memorizing and understanding was a key concept in Jay's thinking and was reflected in his research. Jay sought educational assessment strategies that could help identify whether students were completing assessments of their learning by relying too heavily on memorization, rather than on understanding. He emphasized that "mathematics is a language," and encouraged teaching accordingly. His approach to statistics favored non-linear (multinomial) analysis after extensive collaboration with statistician Norm Shklov. Jay frequently asserted that the "normal curve" of commonly used linear statistics was invalid for educational assessment. Jay continued to do research well into his 80s, transcending his early learning difficulties.
Jay lost his beloved first wife Francis of many years to congestive heart failure, and then his beloved second wife Mary, to cancer. In 2007, Jay married an educator, Valerie. He returned to his statistical research topics and advanced to the international level of educational assessment research, presenting invited lectures at Cambridge University in the UK, and in Germany, Brazil and Romania, as well as at various conferences in North America, and developing a number of publications.
Friends are invited to attend a memorial service at the Unitarian-Universalist Church of the South Hills (UUCSH or Sunnyhill) at 11:00 am, Saturday, September 8, 2018, 1240 Washington Rd, Mt. Lebanon, PA 15228. Memorial contributions may be made to UUCSH, 1240 Washington Rd, Mt. Lebanon, PA 15228; phone: (412) 561-6277, or to the First Metaphysical Church, 8267 E Atherton Rd, Davison, MI 48423; phone: (810) 653-3291.