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Background/Context: The article is part of a line of historical studies on training and improvement travels of Brazilian educators to foreign institutions. These studies have recently increased with the introduction of transnational history approaches. Purpose: This article discusses the training travels of seven Brazilian women, carried out centrally in the 1920s, and the impacts of these trips on their professional careers. Among these women were five teachers and two nurses. Research Design: Through historiographical research, personal and institutional documents are the primary sources to reconstruct their professional and intellectual trajectories. Documents from the institutions involved, particularly from Teachers College, Columbia University, were used, and documents belonging to personal collections, such as diaries, letters, and notebooks. Conclusions: The article gathers the intellectual impressions of the seven Brazilian women provoked by their teachers, colleagues, and experiences in the United States, especially the appropriations they made of their experiences abroad and at Teachers College in particular.

Background/Context: In Brazil, the 1920s and 1930s were characterized by initiatives intended to reform public school systems at the state level. As in the case of both educators whose work we analyze in this article, Brazilian educators traveled abroad searching for experiences that could help them think about the modernization of education in their own country. Some, like Isaías Alves and Noemy Rudolfer, advocated for using psychological tests in schools as part of the change. They translated and adjusted the foreign tests, which were given to primary school students during the 1930s. Focus of Study: Our work deals with the experiences of two Brazilians who visited Teachers College (TC), Columbia University, in New York, in 1930: Isaías Alves and Noemy da Silveira Rudolfer. Both coordinated services of applied psychology when they returned to Brazil: Alves in Rio de Janeiro and Rudolfer in São Paulo. Research Design: Our work develops a historical analysis of the use of psychological tests in Brazil through the experiences of these two educators. Conclusions/Recommendations: Using Alves and Rudolfer as a reference this article intends to demonstrate the relationship that Brazilian educators developed with the American education theories. Along this process, TC was a significant space of mediation between the Brazilian educators and the American professors and authors. Although TC played a substantial role in Rudolfer's and Alves's work, both took different approaches to local conditions. In doing so, they produced another knowledge, showing some of the possibilities open to Brazilian educators when they looked at American authors discussed by TC professors.