Resumen de History of psychological measurement.: Russian context in the 1920s-30s
The rising of the experimental research at the turn of the 19th century is mostly focused on new objective methods and the same interest is shared by scholars in Russia as in Europe and USA. The historical period we evoke begins when science has just discovered the child as a major object of study. Medicine, law, and then all the young human sciences seize it (Ottavi, 2001) to build knowledge about human development. At the time where boundaries between sciences were not clearly established, all of them were on the way to investigate in the same new field: the child and his development. However, specificities in the development of psychological and neurological disciplines will appear in Russia with the First World War and then, will increase with the huge social changes induced by the October Revolution in 1917. If the history of psychological measurement concerns also adults, in our approach, we focus deliberately on the psychological tests applied to children and closely connected, like elsewhere, to the question of education. The Soviet psychological measurement is mainly linked to pedology and its singular fate (Fradkin, 1990; Etkind, 1992, 1997). Pedology, also called “child study”, supposed to be the solution to solve the numerous problems of education in the new socialist society, was also the first science to be officially forbidden in Soviet Union in 1936. Psychological measurement was indeed massively applied to children in various circumstances which we are going to describe further through samples collected in the journal Pedologija, the official organ of Soviet pedology from 1928 to 1932. Lev Vygotskij’s point of view on the matter will contrast this historical context.