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 culture in education in Scotland, its subjects of study, and its key workers, texts and innovations, to illuminate one site of research development and, in doing so, to engage with a limited but developing field, the histories of educational research. Scotland had an inventive and novel approach to research as well as an urgency to its tasks. It was shaped by close connections with the USA, but its style of work was its own, reflecting local cultures of cooperation and meritocracy. Its culture was organic and systematic, network based, non-hierarchical, public and national. It was a leading site of empirical and psychologically based large- and small-scale research, outside North America. It was an exporter and importer of techniques, data and people, and was both national and international at the same time. The Scottish case, and its North American scientific links, illuminates the ways in which the national and the international begin to be closely interwoven in the early twentieth century. (Contains 7 tables and 98 footnotes.)