Gould Bias in IQ Testing

8 Key excerpts on "Gould Bias in IQ Testing"

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  Intelligence Testing and Minority Students

  Foundations, Performance Factors, and Assessment Issues

  • Richard R. Valencia, Lisa A. Suzuki(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Test Bias 115 with the psychometric paradigm itself, which views humans as fairly stable in cognitive functioning and measured intelligence as a culturally independent trait. By sharp con-trast, the cultural-psychology perspective asserts that the role of culture in intelligence and its measurement are critical to understand (see, e.g., Miller, 1997). Although it is quite difficult to operationalize and measure cultural loading in intel-ligence tests, there are objective and empirical methods to detect bias in such tests. When research on test bias began during the late 1970s, many scholars asserted that the con-struct of test bias can be explained in the context of validity theory and, as such, is an em-pirical, testable, quantifiable, and scientific matter. Novices to the subject of test bias typ-ically are surprised that the notion of bias is derived from mathematical statistics. In this field, the term bias refers to the systematic under- or overrepresentation of a population parameter by a statistic based on samples drawn from the population (Jensen, 1980, p. 375). In traditional psychometrics, however, bias takes on a related but distinct mean-ing. It typically is conceived as the systematic (not random) error of some true value of test scores that are connected to group membership (see, e.g., Jensen, 1980; Reynolds, 1982b). Note that group membership is the general referent. It can refer to test bias in the contexts of race/ethnicity, sex, social class, age, and so on. Test bias in the context of race/ethnicity often is referred to as cultural bias, the subject of this chapter. As we dis-cuss later, investigations of cultural bias in intelligence tests can, and sometimes do, em-ploy empirically defined and testable hypotheses and complex statistical analyses (see, e.g., Reynolds, 1982b). Another perspective on test bias was offered by Cole and Moss (1989).

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  Child Psychology

  Development in a Changing Society

  • Robin Harwood, Scott A. Miller, Ross Vasta(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  This finding undermines the genetic explanation for racial differences in IQ and also relates to the two other possible explanations for these differences. The first of these explanations is that IQ tests are biased in favor of the majority culture, and the second is that cultural expectations and interactions differ between racially defined groups. Both of these explanations point to the test-focused environment of the dominant group that facilitates performance. Cultural Bias in the Tests Traditional measures of IQ, such as the Wechsler and the Stanford-Binet, are believed to reflect a general ability that is not specifically taught. How- ever, many question whether these tests are fair for all children. They argue that the com- munication style and certain types of knowledge required for successful performance on the test are culturally bound and that lack of exposure to these required skills undermines performance (Ceci, 1996; Sternberg, 2004; Sternberg et al., 2005). A primary issue is the administration of the tests. Intelligence tests are characterized by a series of factual ques- tions (e.g., what is a knife?). This type of knowledge-seeking question is typical of European American parents and is observed in parent-child interactions from a very early age. How- ever, children in African American families are rarely asked these kinds of questions; rather, adults and children engage in verbally rich exchanges of experiences and story- telling (Greenfield, Quiroz & Raeff, 2000). As a result, African American children may be unfamiliar with and uncomfortable in the traditional testing setting. In addition, it has frequently been argued that many test items are conceptualized unfairly in favor of the majority culture’s perspective, particularly vocabulary items. The cultural bias argument, although receiving mixed evidence when analyzing score differences, nonetheless is supported.

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  Cross-Cultural Neuropsychological Assessment

  Theory and Practice

  • Victor Nell(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  The gaping cultural gap between the habits of the underclass and the habits of the rest of society, far more impassable than a simple economic gap between poor and not poor, or the racial gap of black and white, will make it increasingly difficult for children who have grown up in the inner city to function in the larger society even when they want to. (Hermstein & Murray, 1994, p. 524)

  In a strictly technical sense, this acknowledgment of cultural difference can be reconciled with the denial of bias. This is because IQ tests predict the school and university achievements of Black Americans no less accurately than those of Whites. In other words, when The Bell Curve says that IQ tests are unbiased, it is not talking about bias in the tests, but about external bias , which is measured against the criteria of school and college success.

  Of course, the criterion might be as biased as the test.4 After all, the educational system and the test system are devised and implemented by a single intellectual elite that shares a wide range of work-related and cultural values, and the two systems are two sides of the same coin: Just as academic success can be predicted by IQ test results, so should it be possible to predict IQ by extrapolating from academic success. It is therefore tautolo- gous to say that tests are unbiased when measured against a very similar kind of yardstick.

  The Pernicious Consequences of Inflating IQ Scores . The damage done to individuals whose IQ scores are artificially lowered by test bias is clear. But giving some people artificially higher scores also has a pernicious effect. Commenting on the Spanish version of the WAIS published in 1968 and still in use in the United States for the assessment of Spanish-speaking adults, Melendez (1994) noted that it inflates full scale IQ scores by about 20 points in comparison with the U.S. versions of this test This has the effect of labeling impaired individuals as normal and thus depriving them of social benefits and services to which they would be entitled if their IQs were correcdy computed. Melendez also noted that at the time this version was standardized,

  the concept that a large segment of the Puerto Rican population had significantly lower IQs than the comparative sample of the WAIS must have been both scientifically and politically unsettling…. However, it is both demeaning and patronizing toward Hispanics to use a test … which artificially boosts the IQ results…. The transformations caused by the [Spanish version of the WAIS] may be an egalitarian’s dream, but they can also be a clinician’s nightmare, (p. 392)

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  Psychological Testing

  Principles, Applications, and Issues

  • Robert Kaplan, Dennis Saccuzzo(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Although empirical studies have rarely Test Score Group B Group A Criterion Score FIGURE 19.10 Regression lines with different slopes suggest that a test has different meanings for different groups. This is the most clear-cut example of test bias. Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 CHAPTER 19 ● Test Bias 527 FOCUSED EXAMPLE The Bell Curve: 25 Years Later In 1994, Richard Herrnstein, a noted Harvard psy-chologist, and Charles Murray, a professional writer, published a controversial book titled The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The controversial book provoked an immediate reac-tion from the mass media and serious scholars alike. Some praised the book as important scholarship, but many regarded it as “scientific racism.” In con-trast to the many testing professionals who ques-tion the value of intelligence tests, Herrnstein and Murray argued that, indeed, intelligence tests are the primary correlates of success in American life. Consistent with Spearman, they argued that the g factor is essential to a variety of different skills and abilities. The Bell Curve used data from the National Lon-gitudinal Study of Youth, which had begun in 1979. The study has involved a representative sample of 12,686 youths who were between 14 and 21 years old in 1979 and who have been restudied each year. The book used data collected through 1990. For the analysis, testers used the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). Various analyses showed that IQ scores are related to a wide variety of indexes of success in life ranging from completion of a col-lege degree through the attainment of substantial in-come. Some researchers argued that IQ tests predict who will fill the important leadership roles in society.

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  Educational Differences (RLE Edu L)

  • Arthur Jensen(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Life. I emphasize ‘present’, because this is my answer as of May, 1968 – not guaranteed to be perfectly correlated with my views on the subject six months or a year from now, although I would surely expect a substantial positive correlation, for we are not totally without bearings in this field. The current pace of relevant re-search, however, is such that anyone who hopes to view these issues constructively and creatively must assiduously eschew a doctrinaire stance.

  An old issue

  The issue of cultural bias or status bias in intelligence tests is as old as intelligence testing itself. Alfred Binet in 1905 made a clear distinction between the kinds of judgment, adaptability, and general problem-solving ability he called intelligence and attempted to measure by means of his mental age scales, on the one hand, and, on the other, the kinds of information acquired in schools or in a cultured home. Despite his efforts to come as close as possible to assessing the child’s innate endowment of general intelligence by means of his scales, he consistently found systematic differences between various social status groups. The first formal study of this social aspect of intellectual assessment was published by Binet just five years after the appearance of the first edition of his now famous intelligence test, which became the prototype of nearly all subsequent individual tests of intelligence (1916). Binet reported evidence from France and Belgium that children of professional workers did better on his new intelligence tests, on the average, than did children in working-class neighborhoods. Since then, the question of social-class bias in tests versus real social-class differences in intelligence has been an issue of dispute among psychologists, sociologists, and educators. Innumerable investigations have been made in the United States, in Europe, and in Asia, of the relationship of social status to performance on intelligence tests. These investigations have used a wide variety of intelligence tests and many different methods of measuring social status. Without a single exception, the studies show a positive correlation between intelligence test scores and social status; half of the studies yield correlations between 0·25 and 0·50, with a central tendency in the region of 0·35 to 0·40. When children selected from the total population are grouped into social status categories, the mean IQs of the groups differ by as much as one to two standard deviations (15 or 30 IQ points), depending on the method of status classification. The fact of social class differences in measured intelligence is thus about as solid a fact as any that we have in psychology, and apparently it has long since ceased being a point of dispute. Most of this evidence has been reviewed by Kenneth Eells et al.

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  Culture of Intolerance

  Chauvinism, Class, and Racism in the United States

  • Mark Nathan Cohen(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Our experiences are constantly passed through cultural filters. We pick up on different aspects of the same item or situation so that items on tests or everyday situations have different meanings to different people. People who share the mainstream culture have an advantage because they see things the same way their testers (or employers) do, not because they are smart. Thus, even those IQ questions most carefully constructed to be fair or culture-neutral can readily be shown to be culture-bound and biased at a multitude of structural levels. And, as with an onion, peeling away the layers of bias leaves nothing. The bias is not something that can be scrubbed off the surface. No matter how hard we try to frame questions objectively, we are testing cultural aware-ness, not intelligence. There is no such thing as measuring pure thinking ability because all tests (and probably all thought itself) build on cultural categories and examples, just as all language builds on conventional rules of grammar. IQ tests (and other similar standardized tests) can be used to measure the extent to which an individual has learned the vocabulary and the rules of classification of a particular culture. Just as classroom tests are used to discover who has absorbed which facts and concepts from the curriculum and to adjust teaching patterns in response, IQ tests that are designed to measure the learning that educators con-sider to be most important could be a valuable tool for diagnosis— as they were originally intended to be. But that is not, for the most part, the way the tests are used. For the moment, perhaps the best use to which such tests could be put would be asking groups of students to identify and discuss the cultural biases in each question as a means of understanding American culture and its assumptions.

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  Child Psychology

  A Canadian Perspective

  • Alastair Younger, Scott A. Adler, Ross Vasta(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  IQ tests thus involve an evaluative component that is impossible to escape, which is one reason why they have always been controversial. The evalua- tive nature of IQ provides a point of contrast not only with Piaget and information processing, but also with the sociocultural perspective. As we have seen, sociocultural researchers often identify differences in what children know or how they think; their emphasis, however, is on the cognitive strengths that children develop within a particular cultural setting, not on the deficiencies of one group relative to another. Another difference between the intelligence-test approach and the other perspectives con- cerns purpose and uses. The research discussed in the two preceding chapters was very much theoretically oriented, its goal being to identify basic cognitive processes. Although such re- search has practical applications (e.g., effects on school curriculum), to date, such applications have been limited and secondary to the basic theoretical aims. In contrast, the psychometric approach has been pragmatically oriented from the start. As we will see, IQ tests were designed for practical purposes, and they have always had practical uses—most notably, to determine what kind of schooling a child is to receive. This factor, too, contributes to the controversy. In contrast to many measures used by psychologists, IQ tests can make a real difference in a child’s life. We begin this chapter by reviewing what IQ tests for children look like, along with some of their strengths and weaknesses. We then move on to some of the theoretical issues that have been the focus of research in the psychometric tradition. Because of the importance of the ques- tion, we pay special attention to the role of experience in the development of intelligence, with a focus on schooling as it both contributes to and is affected by individual differences in intelli- gence.

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  Social Justice and Educational Measurement

  John Rawls, the history of testing, and the future of education

  • Zachary Stein(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Item design, administration procedures, and scoring were remarkably lax, and systemically disadvantaged certain groups, including those who could not read and those with little knowledge of American culture. The data were systematically misinterpreted to downplay the impacts of environment, which could have served as possible explanations for the findings. A wide variety of factors were not controlled for in analyses, including educational background, socio-economic status, and language of origin. Explaining individual differences as due only to innate aspects of the individual, and not to the institutions surrounding the individual, was especially problematic because it assumed what it set out to prove, that intelligence is an innate trait that is immune to environmental factors. This kind of argument, which turns a blind eye to issues of economic class, cultural difference, and the inequitable distribution of educational goods, can be found in nearly all the research done during the first decades of the IQ testing movement (Sokal, 1990; Gould, 1996). Strong hereditarian presuppositions led researchers to ignore or dismiss possible environmental determinants in IQ test performance as well as explanations for academic achievement that were not linked to differences in innate intelligence. Unfortunately, these forms of argument and analysis eventually found their way into schools. The administration and statistical procedures that accompanied the institutionalization of efficiency-oriented testing practices rendered differences in academic achievement due to socio-economic class nearly invisible, focusing instead on the quality of the individual child’s innate endowment. For example, reporting on one of the first large-scale implementations of testing in public schools, Terman’s student Virgil Dickson (1922, pp

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