In 2018, the OECD launched a pilot study titled International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS) which assesses the emergent literacy, numeracy, self-regulation, and social emotional skills of children at age five. These skills are described as fundamental for children’s future achievements in school and later on in adulthood (OECD, 2020). According to the OECD (2015), the IELS will eventually “provide information on the trajectory between early learning outcomes and those at age 15, as measured by PISA” (p. 103). Thus, the basic assumptions underlying the IELS is that intelligence and socioemotional skills can be objectively evaluated and compared, and that they are stable and predictable

Ironically dubbed the ‘Baby PISA’, the IELS has already drawn a great deal of criticism, which tends to be in line with that of PISA (Auld & Morris, 2019; Moss et al., 2016). However, despite obvious connections to other large-scale assessments, the IELS stands out in terms of its methodology which was developed for children who typically cannot yet read and write. The instructions were given by a pre-recorded voice on a tablet and children could indicate their preferred response by touching items or moving them around the screen (OECD, 2020). Thus, at its core the IELS relies on children’s ability to ‘read’ pictures and to match what they hear and see with what they know.

The use of visual imagery as a tool for measuring cognitive and socio-emotional development is by no means new. In fact, many intelligence and personality tests developed as early as the early 1900s (such as Binet-Simon intelligence scale or the Rorschach test) incorporated some form of images. Developed for diagnosing developmental or intellectual deficiencies in young children or to identify personality and mental health disorders, such tests provided a technique to reveal the invisible and to make the perceived differences between humans to become observable, measurable, comparable and, thus, ‘real’. Despite much criticism, tests of this kind are still widely used to differentiate ‘normal’ individuals from those ‘gifted’ or ‘at risk’ and to assign different pedagogical treatments to different groups of students (Paul, 2004).

By measuring the cognitive and emotional intelligence of preschoolers, the IELS marks the culmination of a century in which testing was of paramount importance. In this paper we situate the IELS within a broader history of image-based assessments to discuss how images function as a tool for differentiating students, controlling education, and predicting future risks (cf. Pettersson & Nordin, forthcoming). For that we trace the history of some of the most common intelligence and personality tests and outline the conditions of possibility that enabled image-based tests to appear scientific and to function as a source of evidence.