Obituaries

Malcolm J. Slakter a longtime faculty member in the Graduate School of Education, died June 12 at home in Honolulu. He was 89.

A native of Syracuse, Slakter earned a master’s degree in math from Albany State Teachers College in 1951 and completed a PhD in educational measurement, statistics and evaluation from Syracuse University in 1962.

He was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley for two years before joining the faculty of UB’s Department of Educational Psychology as an associate professor in 1965. He was promoted to full professor in 1969. He served as acting department chair in spring 1974, and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Health Education from 1976-79.  

Slakter’s research interests included test-wiseness, the effects of guessing strategies and applied statistics. He published a statistics textbook, “Statistical Inference for Educational Researchers,” as well as 47 peer-reviewed papers in statistics, measurement, education, dental and nursing journals.

He was a visiting professor at a variety of universities, including the University of Maine, Orono (summer 1963), New Mexico State University (spring 1972), the University of British Columbia (1985-86) and the University of Washington in Seattle (fall 1990). In spring 1979, he was a visiting scholar in the University Teaching Methods Unit of the Institute of Education at the University of London.

After retiring from UB in 1992, he moved to Honolulu and was involved in many volunteer activities in the local community. He served as a board member and president of B’nai B’rith, a board member and president of Jewish community services, and a board member and vice president of Hawaii Prostate Cancer Coalition.