Martin Lawn

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• PhD
• Hon Professor at University of Edinburgh

Chapter 1, Organising the Future of Educational Research in Post-war Europe and Beyond, discusses the rise of transnational research in education, and its close connection to the emerging field of global education and knowledge production and policy. The concept of the ‘disembedded laboratory’ draws attention to spatially oriented histories of scie...

Chapter 6, Editing of the International Encyclopaedia of Education, 1980–1994, analyses how Husén used his wide network of worldwide educational experts to move beyond the creation of research knowledge, the subject of his earlier work, to its description and publication across world settings. The monumental task he directed, the International Ency...

Chapter 3, Collecting International Data: Husén and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, discusses Husén’s role in the rise of international large-scale assessments. Focusing on IEA, the organization that Husén chaired for 17 years, the chapter discusses how the production of international data relied on ongo...

Chapter 4 links the formation of the IIEP, formed by the UNESCO, the World Bank and the Ford Foundation, to further the development of the internationalization of education research. The IIEP had the mission to create and build capacity for educational planning in countries of the Global South, with a particular focus on research capacity-building...

Chapter 7, Words for the World: Writing and Publishing Strategies for an International Book Market, discusses Husén’s academic writings. Focusing on his international publications and experiences, the chapter is divided into three parts. The first discusses the various ways in which Husén used his international experience, either to strengthen his...

Chapter 2, Forming Transnational Networks: The Early 1950s in Europe, follows the early years of the growth of a national and post-national education research community in Europe, and the foundation of new national research institutes in education, as well as the creation and exchange of scientific data between scholars and the importance of intern...

Chapter 5, Education Futuramas: Torsten Husén and Futurological Thinking in Education, examines the Aspen/Berlin seminars in the 1970s as focal points in the study of the role of expertise in solving educational crises. The chapter discusses the function of ‘futurology’ to construct broader norms and understandings about the ‘learning society’. Thi...

Throughout the 20thC, the measurement of education became a defining element of the governing of education. At first, it was part of the accumulating physical resources of administrative offices, and usually recorded the budgetary elements, like the cost of teachers or population expansion costs. It could exist in centralized and decentralized site...

In this paper, I intend to describe the objects of schooling in the context of their relation to each other, the building and the teacher. My interest is in the technology of schooling, that is, its artefacts and the routines of their uses. It is common to think about the teacher as the dominant element in classroom systems, working with or overcom...

The history of testing often limits itself to the science of intelligence and the rise of selection in schools. Both these areas are very important but are too tightly drawn. Historically, there is a relation between the two ways of understanding the role of testing in society: they are written by psychologists [students of intelligence and factori...

Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to s...

A área da educação na União Europeia (UE) geralmente é vista como uma questão e responsabilidade nacional, uma área subsidiária, mas ao longo do tempo foi ocorrendo uma convergência de políticas das nações. A UE não comanda esta convergência; nem é capaz de fazê-lo, mas, cada vez mais, governa a área da educação em todos os estágios. O problema da...

Sloyd, a Swedish handwork programme for schools, beginning in the late years of the 19th century, was influential in Sweden but almost immediately it began to influence teachers and educators from other countries. This influence is explored in this paper. Using transnational historiography, the sites of influence, and the flow of people and texts,...

Large scale assessment influences national and international educational policy debates and reforms. Assessment data is increasingly used as a government instrument. However, within the contemporary realm of the current global testing regime both the cultural and the historical conditions of assessment are often neglected. This volume is therefore...

This chapter argues that, for a long time, dominant approaches examining education policy have largely studied this as a domestic matter. By contrast, through building upon a political sociological approach grounded in an inclusive ontology of Europe, Sotiria Grek and Martin Lawn argue that education in Europe can and should be seen through a diffe...

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? What unacknowledged assumptions do we hold? This Introduction argues that, for a long time, EU studies has been dominated by discussions in which ‘the EU’ is consistently treated as an object: supranational, intergovernmental, multi-level, monotopia. Yet, theoretical debates over whi...

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU – of its development, its policies and its working processes – shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? This book argues that continued theoretical debates on the EU, although important, are nonetheless camouflagi...

Through a study of a privately funded and ambitious inquiry into the education system of the United States, the relations between the development of comparative education as an activity and the governing of education systems in the early 20th century can be illuminated. The relations and interests of early comparativists were mobilized and enhanced...

At the world exhibitions of the 1870s Sweden displayed a schoolhouse, with examples of teaching material and student work. How did Sweden ship an entire schoolhouse to these exhibitions? What impact did the schoolhouse have on visitors to the exhibition? The purpose of this article is to shed light on the transnational influences operating between...

The formation of the EERA has taken place over the last twenty years and it has accumulated practices and organizational procedures. The core principles of the Association were about inclusivity, represented through membership of national associations in the Council, and European identity, safeguarded by ECER regulations and the EERJ. The founding...

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU – of its development, its policies and its working processes – shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? This book argues that continued theoretical debates on the EU, although important, are nonetheless camouflagi...

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU – of its development, its policies and its working processes – shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? This book argues that continued theoretical debates on the EU, although important, are nonetheless camouflagi...

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? What unacknowledged assumptions do we hold? This Introduction argues that, for a long time, EU studies has been dominated by discussions in which ‘the EU’ is consistently treated as an object: supranational, intergovernmental, multi-level, monotopia. Yet, theoretical debates over whi...

Transnational collaboration by educational researchers in Europe has grown fast since the mid-1990s and the means to support it have become more easily accessible. A study of the growth of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) since its foundation in the mid-1990s shows how transnational research in European education began, and how...

The University of Edinburgh and Moray House teachers’ college began to develop a new model of research and teaching, institutionalised in a combined university department and teachers’ college, with a research laboratory and advanced research degree in the 1920s. This new institution was modelled on the innovative and influential Teachers College,...

[Artible by Martin Lawn. Translation by Rafaela Silva Rabelo. Available in http://periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/rbhe/article/view/38866] Os historiadores da educação vêm enfrentando problemas que, devido a diferentes razões de cunho tradicional, têm sido evitados. Ainda há fortes limites e fronteiras em torno de nosso trabalho que nos disciplina...

This paper looks at the ways in which the changing governing of education in Europe influences the trajectories of inspectorates and discusses changes in systems of inspection relating to Ofsted in England and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMIE) in Scotland. In drawing this comparison, we first consider the historically-embedded characte...

This paper draws on the first, completed phase of a research project on inspection as governing in three European inspection systems. The data presented here draw attention to the rather under-researched associational activities of European inspectorates and their developing practices of policy learning and exchange, and highlight their significanc...

Resumo: Este artigo tem varios temas importantes condensados: a relacao entre a organizacao da escolarizacao em massa e sua sustentacao por meio de tecnologias simples, os modos pelos quais as rotinas das aulas e da escola ligavam objetos a acoes, a relacao especial entre inovadores e artefatos, e a economia e o metodo de producao destes artefatos...

Resumo This paper has several significant themes compressed within it: the relation between the organization of mass schooling and its sustenance by simple technologies, the ways in which class and school routines bound objects and actions together, the particular relation between innovators and artifacts, and the economy and method of production...

The idea of a system of education has never been fully accepted in England. A more realistic translation of the realities of English education is that of systems of education, folded inside each other. Although it is possible to outline the building blocks of a national system (primary, secondary, further and higher), the political, spatial and con...

Through the twentieth century, an international scientific community in education, testing and statistics appeared which was rooted in the same texts and processes and worked together across distance and in specific research centres. From Thorndike in New York in the early 1900s to Husén in Hamburg and Stockholm in the late 1900s, there is a web of...

The starting point for this article is a film about Scottish education, Children’s Story. Children’s Story was one of a group of seven documentaries made for the 1938 British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, under the supervision of John Grierson. The film was an official entry into the Exhibition and is a formal display of key ideas and elements of S...

Countries in Europe, through the European Union, are creating, as part of the market and its governance, a new policy space in education. It is being formed through law, regulation, networking and harmonization. The development of standards across the different fields of policy, statistical calculation and commerce underpins and extends the creatio...

In England, over the last decade, powerful technologies and software have enabled a new way of governing education through performance data. This has allowed the landscape of education to be reshaped. Its surface features continue but underneath new connections are made and older relations severed. Data flows travel between schools and central gove...

Introduction: QAE, Europeanisation and the governing of education This issue addresses the relentless production of data to monitor the quality and performance of education in Europe and their interpretation in terms of governance. Contributors examine to what extent these data and the drive towards quality assurance and evaluation behind them can...

“Seeing” like the State: The contemporary governing of education in England In common with other European countries, the governing of education in England may be observed first through its public policies and policies on market choice in schooling or new children’s services are its contemporary symbols. However, in recent years, a fundamental reord...

This paper discusses evidence, collected during an ESRC‐funded project (‘Reconstructing a Scottish School of Educational Research, 1925–1950’), of a remarkable vision to involve teachers in educational research in Scotland by the Educational Institute of Scotland in the 1920s through the work of its Research Committee. Led by William Boyd, the Comm...

tL)ao0/ac1r9wi.40uc7na3k73-9667448X0 (online) Educational research was established in the early decades of the twentieth century in many parts of Europe. The early years were the crucial years as they established dominant forms of inquiry, pioneer sites, and related artefacts, the tools and texts. This paper focuses on the early growth of research...

Sir Godfrey Hilton Thomson was Bell Professor of Education at the University of Edinburgh from 1925 until 1951. He was a prominent theorist of intelligence, statistician and psychometrician, educational researcher, deviser and distributor of intelligence tests, and worked on the issue of intelligence and family size as it affected the population. D...

9133908 (online) This paper discusses evidence, collected during an ESRC-funded project (‘Reconstructing a Scottish School of Educational Research, 1925–1950’), of a remarkable vision to involve teachers in educational research in Scotland by the Educational Institute of Scotland in the 1920s through the work of its Research Committee. Led by Willi...

During the quarter century between 1925 and 1950, Scotland was at the leading edge of educational research internationally, and in contributions to the study of intelligence. Factors contributing to these achievements were the existence of the extraordinary network of the Scottish Council for Research in Education, talented individuals, a highly qu...

This article draws on critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore the extent to which there is an interdependence between new governing forms, often characterised as 'post-bureaucratic' and new knowledge forms, that are often described in terms of `mode 2' knowledge - that is, knowledge that combines the academy, the state and the private sector i...

This paper discusses evidence for a unique vision to involve teachers in educational research in Scotland by the Educational Institute of Scotland in the 1920s through the work of its Research Committee. Led by William Boyd, the Committee thought that involvement in research was a crucial stepping stone towards achieving professional status for tea...

Forty years ago, sociology, psychology, philosophy and history had a secure position in the academic study of education in the UK but that is no longer the case. The policy context that has increasingly come to influence our teaching and the funding of our research, with its pressure on the production of knowledge which stresses use value, has, we...

Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson is one of the key foundational actors in the history of the educational sciences in the UK. At a time when educational studies and the study of educational psychology were very closely linked, in the decades of the mid-twentieth century, Thomson was a crucial figure in education research. He is known for his work on in...

Modern factor analysis is the outgrowth of Spearman's original "2-factor" model of intelligence, according to which a mental test score is regarded as the sum of a general factor and a specific factor. As early as 1914, Godfrey Thomson realized that the data did not require this interpretation and he demonstrated this by proposing what became known...

Godfrey Thomson (1881-1955) was a leading figure in intelligence testing who made his name in that field first at Armstrong College, Newcastle, and then at the University of Edinburgh. In the course of his practical work he identified many theoretical problems which were essentially statistical in character. In particular, he used maximum likelihoo...

The indeterminacy of factor scores has been a perennial source of debate since the time of Spearman. The main purpose of this paper is to show that, in spite of his inadequate tools and concepts, Sir Godfrey Thomson's approach of 70 years ago was on the right lines. His thinking was constrained by the primitive state of his statistical understandin...

Governing processes in Europe and within Europeanization are often opaque and appearances can deceive. The normative practices of improvement in education, and the connected growth in performance measurement, have been largely understood in their own terms. However, the management of flows of information through quality assurance can be examined as...

Here we reprint, and provide background and a commentary on, a recently-rediscovered lecture by Godfrey H. Thomson entitled, “Intelligence and civilisation.” It was delivered at the University of Manchester, UK, on 23rd October, 1936, printed in 1937 in the short-lived Journal of the University of Manchester and as a pamphlet in Edinburgh. It was o...

: This paper draws on a comparative study of the growth of data and the changing governance of education in Europe. It looks at data and the 'making' of a European Education Policy Space, with a focus on 'policy brokers' in translating and mediating demands for data from the European Commission. It considers the ways in which such brokers use data...

This paper examines the reception and use of PISA results in post -devolution Scotland (1999 -2007). The pattern of participation constantly changes as the PISA cycle unfolds. In 2000 the UK took part as one country (the Scottish and English/Northern Irish re- sults were analysed separately later); in 2003 England failed to reach the response level...

This article draws on critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore the extent to which there is an interdependence between new governing forms, often characterised as 'post-bureaucratic' and new knowledge forms, that are often described in terms of 'mode 2' knowledge - that is, knowledge that combines the academy, the State and the private sector i...

Reports an error in "A conversation between Charles Spearman, Godfrey Thomson, and Edward L. Thorndike: The International Examinations Inquiry Meetings 1931-1938" by Ian J. Dreary, Martin Lawn and David J. Bartholomew (History of Psychology, 2008[May], Vol 11[2], 122-142). The authors would like to indicate that Charles Spearman's year of death was...

Even within "an appreciation of the fundamentally social nature of scientific activity" (K. Danziger, 1990, p. 3), it is unusual to read what key scientists actually said to each other, directly or in audience. Here the authors describe, structure, illustrate, and interpret the verbatim statements made by, and a detailed conversation that took plac...

This book focuses on the International Examinations Inquiry (IEI), an international, well-funded scientific project that operated in the 1930s, attracting key world figures in educational research, and which undertook significant exchanges of data. Originally involving the USA, Scotland, England, France, Germany and Switzerland, the IEI grew to inc...

The field of education research has grown enormously in England over the last 25 years — in size, complexity, forms of production and purpose. It has been shaped by governmental, market and production changes, and it appears to be moving outside the university sector as well. The British Educational Research Association is trying to map the field a...

The coincident arrival of a European policy space in education and a European Educational Research Association [EERA], and their subsequent relation, will be the subject of this paper. EERA is a hybrid organization—it supports scientific networking, it is a social partner in EU policy, it is a first level social space for networking, and increasing...

The European Space for Education is a term that has come into use to describe the emergence of a multifaceted web of relations and a transnational flow of information and people, with heterogeneous forms. It is being created in sharp contrast to the older central roles played by organizations, statist jurisdictions, rigid borders and national sites...

Established in the late 1920s, the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) was a highly significant and influential institute for educational research, in both the scope and the methodology of its work, in Scotland and abroad. It was one of the first of a new kind of institution; it signalled the rise of specialized research institutes, o...