Copyright

Christian Ydesen; Brit Marie Hovland; Emma Vikström

Published On

2026-03-02

Page Range

pp. 73–100

Language

  • English

Print Length

28 pages

2. The Scandinavian Space of IQ Testing

Between Normal and Special Education, 1918–1940

Chapter of: Historicizing IQ Testing: Intelligence Assessments and their Role in Norwegian Society from the 1900s to the Present(pp. 73–100)
This chapter examines the emergence, circulation, and institutionalisation of IQ testing and conceptions of intelligence in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark during the interwar period. Drawing on prosopographic methods and historical source criticism, it analyses exchanges among key educators, psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors who helped shape a transnational Scandinavian arena for special education. Using the Nordic Special School Association and its journal (1923–1940) as a central point of departure—along with archival correspondence, policy documents, and contemporary newspaper articles—the chapter shows how Scandinavian actors used one another as reference societies when developing new practices of educational differentiation. Through Bruno Latour’s concept of the “centre of calculation,” the chapter conceptualises this inter-Scandinavian arena as a hub that accumulated, codified, and redistributed knowledge across national boundaries. It concludes that the interwar Scandinavian experience illuminates enduring dilemmas in inclusive education: balancing universal provision with targeted differentiation, managing professional boundaries, and governing the politics of measurement in the service of social reform.

Contributors

Christian Ydesen

(author)
Chair of History of Education at Universität Zürich
Honorary Research Fellow at University of Oxford
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7804-6821

Christian Ydesen is Chair of History of Education and Education Policy Analysis at the Department of Education, University of Zürich, Switzerland, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He has held visiting researcher positions at the University of Edinburgh (2008–2009, 2016), the University of Birmingham (2013), the University of Oxford (2019), and the University of Milan (2021, 2024). His research explores international organizations, the global governance of education, educational testing and assessment, as well as accountability and diversity in education from historical, comparative, and international perspectives. He has published extensively in these areas, contributing numerous book chapters and journal articles. Since 2025, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the European Educational Research Journal.

Brit Marie Hovland

(author)
Associate professor at VID Specialized University
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1191-5260

Brit Marie Hovland is associate professor, VID Specialized University, Oslo. Hovland's expertise lies within the history of education, historiography, curriculum, didactics and pedagogy. Her main research topics has been national identities and nation-building, historiography, curriculum, the contextual changing epistemology and narratology of school subjects, child-centered education, and more. Currently she focuses on interwar progressive education and curriculum reforms, including Sagene exploratory school and experimental psychology, IQ and tests. She is the Norwegian leader of the international NFR research project Transloyalties in History and Citizenship Education. Hovland is scientific expert on the Swedish Research Council.

Emma Vikström

(author)
Postdoctoral fellow at Umeå University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1233-5310

Emma Vikström is a postdoctoral fellow in history at Umeå University, Sweden. In her dissertation, The Creation of the New Human, she analyzed the relationship between education and eugenics in the work of Swedish progressive educator Ellen Key. Vikström’s overall research interests lie in the field of inclusion and exclusion in historical educational contexts, and her current postdoctoral project focuses on the relationship between race biology and gender in Swedish educational debates during the first half of the twentieth century.