I was recently cleaning my office when I stumbled upon these priceless photos from a 1999 historical meeting in Chapel Hill, NC that involved John Horn, Jack Carroll, Richard Woodcock, Gale Roid, John Wasserman, Fred Schrank and myself). The provenance (I’ve always wanted to use this word 😉) for the meeting is provided below the pictures in the form of extracted quotes from Wasserman (2019) and McGrew (2023) (links below), which I confirmed with John Wasserman via a personal email on August, 30, 2025.
The 1990 CHC-based WJ-R had already been published and the WJ III author team were nearing completion of the CHC-based WJ III (2001). Unbeknownst to many is the fact that Woodock was originally planned to be one of the coauthors of the SB5 (along with Gale Roid), which explains his presence in the photo’s that document one of several planning meetings for the CHC-based SB5.
I was also involved as a consultant during the early planning for the CHC-based SB5 because of my knowledge of the evolving CHC theory. My role was to review and integrate all available published and unpublished factor analysis research on all prior editions of the different SB legacy tests. I post these pictures with the names of the people included in each photo immediately below the photo. No other comments (save for the next paragraph) are provided.
To say the least, my presence at this meeting (as well as many other meetings with Carroll and Horn together, as well as with each alone, that occured when planning the various editions of the WJ’s) was surrealistic. One could sense a paradigm shift in intelligence testing that was happening in real time during the meetings! The expertise of the leading theorists regarding what became known as CHC theory, together with the expertise of the applied test developers of Woodcock and Roid, provided me with learning experiences that cannot be captured in any book or university course work.
Click on images to enlarge.
Be gentle, these are the best available copies of images taken with an old-school camera (not smart-phone based digital images)
“It was only when I left TPC for employment with Riverside Publishing (now Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt; HMH) in 1996 that I met Richard W. Woodcock and Kevin S. McGrew and became immersed in the extended Gf-Gc (fluid-crystallized)/ Horn-Cattell theory, beginning to appreciate how Carroll's Three-Stratum (3S) model could be operationalized in cognitive-intellectual tests. Riverside had been the home of the first Gf-Gc intelligence test, the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale, Fourth Edition (SB IV; R. L. Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986), which was structured hierarchically with Spearman's g at the apex, four broad ability factors at a lower level, and individual subtests at the lowest level. After acquiring the Woodcock–Johnson (WJ-R; Woodcock & Johnson, 1989) from DLM Teaching Resources, Riverside now held a second Gf-Gc measure. The WJ-R Tests of Cognitive Ability measured seven broad ability factors from Gf-Gc theory with an eighth broad ability factor possible through two quantitative tests from theWJ-R Tests of Achievement. When I arrived, planning was underway for new test editions – the WJ III (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) and the SB5 (Roid, 2003) – and Woodcock was then slated to co-author both tests, although he later stepped down from the SB5. Consequently, I had the privilege of participating in meetings in 1999 with John B. Carroll and John L. Horn, both of whom had been paid expert consultants to the development of the WJ-R” (Wasserman, 2019, p. 250)
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“In 1999, Woodcock brokered the CHC umbrella term with Horn and Carroll for practical reasons (McGrew 2005)—to facilitate internal and external communication regarding the theoretical model of cognitive abilities underlying the then-overlapping test development activities (and some overlapping consultants, test authors, and test publisher project directors; John Horn, Jack Carroll, Richard Woodcock, Gale Roid, Kevin McGrew, Fred Schrank, and John Wasserman) of the Woodcock–Johnson III and the Stanford Binet–Fifth Edition by Riverside Publishing” (McGrew, 2023, p. 3)
