Copyright

Jim Wynter Porter

Published On

2026-03-02

Page Range

pp. 401–442

Language

  • English

Print Length

42 pages

13. Drawing Boundaries, Building Barriers

Twentieth-Century US and Norwegian Intelligence Testing from a Comparative Perspective

  • Jim W. Porter (author)
Chapter of: Historicizing IQ Testing: Intelligence Assessments and their Role in Norwegian Society from the 1900s to the Present(pp. 401–442)
This chapter compares developments in IQ testing in the US and Norway across the 20th century based on other contributions to this volume. This comparative analysis finds that in Norway IQ testing was largely (though not entirely) constrained to special education identification, while in the US practice expanded much more rapidly and across a wider range of educational domains. In the US by the mid-1920s, for example, IQ testing was already being used not only for special education placement, but also emergently as a tool for tracking the general student population into academic and vocational curricula. This chapter argues that the varying degrees to which racism and classism interacted with educational policy and market forces in both national cases helps explain the differential speed and scale of IQ’s expansion in Norway and the US.

Contributors

Jim W. Porter

(author)

Jim W. Porter earned his PhD in history from Michigan State University. He then served as a postdoctoral fellow and researcher at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, and subsequently as a research fellow at the Science History Institute and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. His first book, Safeguarding Whiteness, is in revision with John Hopkins University Press. His research explores the rapid implementation of ‘intelligence’ policy (and related standardized testing practices) in the years immediately following the 1954 Brown v. Board mandate to desegregate public schools.