“A Psychology for Pedagogy: Intelligence Testing in USSR in the 1920s”, 2014 ():
This article examines a case of intelligence testing conducted in the mid-1920s, while considering the broader political and scientific context of Soviet life.
Guided by questions about the status and influence of mental measurement in Russian society, previously and after the revolution, as well as asking about the main actors in the fields linked to testing, such as psychology, pedagogy, and pedology, during this tumultuous period.
To answer these questions, journals and difficult-to-access archival sources were used, which provided evidence regarding the enthusiasm psychological testing had on scholars in the 1920s and the institutional support they received for their surveys.
The article offers some hints concerning why this was so and why this situation changed completely a decade later.
[Keywords: pedagogy, psychology, pedology, mental tests, 1920s USSR]
…Nevertheless, a thorough study of the contemporary literature, and especially the consultation of relevant Russian and French journals, will throw a new fight on the crucial role mental testing played after the 1917 October Revolution, in a country which was eager to use modem scientific devices to reform education in order to create the new kind of citizen needed for its political project. There fore, pedagogy, pedology, and also, to a certain extent, psychology, received great attention and official support in an attempt to systematically study the infant mind. The foundation of new institutions and professional associations immersed in ambitious testing programs show this trend very clearly, together with the enthusiasm about psychological testing expressed by lead ing pedologists of the time. I will argue in this article that faith in “testology” in the Soviet Union was closely finked with that of pedology, the science of the child, which, in the Soviet context, was supposed to become “the revolutionary Marxist science.”
However, this situation changed toward the end of the 1920s. During this time, there were many debates about the sense, meaning, and consequences of psychological measurement applied to children. The resistance toward test ing on the part of teachers, parents, and the authorities grew until there was an official prohibition of testing practices in the mid-1930s, which became one of the specific events in the history of Russian psychology.