The presentation concerns a long-established form of assessment within the German school system, which is separated in a special education system and a regular school system. This assessment or so-called special education intake procedure (SEIP) is designed to determine whether a student is suited to the regular school system, or whether he or she should instead attend a special education school. Thus it refers to an implicit image of a normal child and guides to a processes of normalization and selection. Under a historically perspective, the SEIP coexisted in both parts of Germany during the German partition. It played an important role in the school system of the western part of Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG, as well as in the eastern part, called German Democratic Republic or GDR. This presentation is based on findings derived from an ongoing investigation of the SEIP during the period 1958 to 1978. Student files from the FRG and GDR are compared to test the consistency of decisions made about further school attendance in the SEIP. Of special relevance in the presentation is the analysis of the questionnaires used in the SEIP. They were standardized in both countries and changed during the period under investigation. The main changes affected the questions asked in the questionnaires and the professions involved in the SEIP. This can be said for the FRG as well as in the GDR, but has to be specified in each case in a differ-ent way. So the presentation will mainly concern questions about the way these changes can be described in the two countries and the historical occurrences which influenced these developments. Furthermore, questions about the results of comparing the SEIP in the two countries will be of inter-est. This comparison concerns structural aspects of the SEIP as well as possible assertions about the visions of a normal and an abnormal child contained in the analyzed questionnaires.

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