“Slow and Scatterbrained”: The First Testing and Assessment of Pupils with Intellectual Disability at a Norwegian Remedial School, 1916–1924

The Thorshaug Institute, established in 1878, was one of the three largest boarding schools in Norway for children with intellectual disability (ID). Between 1916–1924, 252 children were assessed for admittance to the school through informal testing. The documentation from this testing is brief, handwritten protocol notes by anonymous teachers on each child. These notes were internal documents but are rich sources of information. This article is a microhistorical study of these sources. The article attempts to answer questions about how these sources show the school’s testing practices, how the children were described and evaluated in the assessments, what ideas about intellectual disability are reflected and what the notes and other supporting sources say about who the children were.