The Russian/Brazilian psychologist Helena Antipoff and the reception and circulation of intelligence tests in the 1930s in Brazil
Cesar Rota Junior 
| Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Important educational reforms occurred in Brazil in 1920 and 1930, according to an agenda of modernization and urbanization of the country. Proposals to modernize education were inspired by theoretical, technical and scientific advances in the field of intelligence measurement. These proposals were opposed to humanistic trends in education that were the standard at that time in the country. In this context some instruments for measuring intelligence circulated in Brazil, with the purpose of evaluating intellectual capacities of children in the educational context. The study describes and analyzes the reception and circulation of intelligence tests in the Brazilian school context in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the state of Minas Gerais. Among the tests that circulated in Brazil in that period we can identify: 1) The Dearbon intelligence test; 2) The Goodenough drawing test and 3) The Ballard test. The aforementioned tests were brought to Brazil by Russian psychologist and educator Antipoff Helena, a former student of Édouard Claparède in Geneva, and former member of the Binet-Simon laboratory in Paris, under the guidance of Theodore Simon. Helena Antipoff migrated to Brazil at the age of 37 and lived in Brazil until her death, at age 82, in 1974, where she developed an important work in the field of educational psychology and special education. We hypothesized that prior experience of Helena Antipoff in Russia, France and Switzerland contributed significantly to the specifics of the reception and circulation of intelligence tests in Brazil. This presentation is based on work co-authored by Sergio Cirino and Valeria Nhome Meireles Marinho.
