Article ID: CBB370728709

Guidance counseling in the mid-twentieth century United States: Measurement, grouping, and the making of the intelligent self (2020)

unapi

This article investigates National Defense Education Act and National Defense Education Act-related calls in the late 1950s for the training of guidance counselors, an emergent profession that was to play an instrumental role in both the measuring and placement of students in schools by “intelligence” or academic “ability”. In analyzing this mid-century push for more guidance counseling in schools, this article will first explore a foundational argument for the fairness of intelligence testing made by Educational Testing Service psychometrician William Turnbull in 1951, and then later taken up and employed by other National Defense Education Act-era advocates of testing and grouping. Secondly, this analysis will proceed to National Defense Education Act expert testimony, examining here assertions of the necessity of guidance counseling in schools, and an emergent and shared vision articulating the role guidance counseling was supposed to play in school life. A pattern or structure to this vision emerges here. According to its advocates, guidance counseling would not only inform the self-understanding of the measured individual, but it would also work to condition the ideology of individual intelligence across numerous layers of social life around the student: through peer group, through teachers and school administrators, and finally through home, family, and the wider community.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB370728709/

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Authors & Contributors
Caterina Guenzi
Emma Bedor Hiland
Erica Torrens-Rojas
Ryan, Ann Marie
Trãni, Christophe
Spinney, Russell A.
Concepts
Psychology
Intelligence tests
Science and society
Teaching; pedagogy
Education
Intelligence
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
United States
France
San Francisco (California)
Spain
Australia
Mexico
Institutions
University of Toronto
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