Educational Differences (RLE Edu L)

Arthur Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136461149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Among particular issues discussed in this book are the problems of the cultural disadvantaged, the problems of devising psychological tests which are not biased towards any particular culture, the problems of minority groups of children in education and the relationship between heritability and teachability.

Another look
at culture-fair testing

It is galling, but not wholly unrewarding, to be misquoted in a popular magazine. I had the experience when Life (March 31, 1967) ran a feature article on ‘early learning’ and incorrectly stated that I had invented a culture-free test of intelligence. The results of this misunderstanding were instructive to me and provided much of the stimulus for writing the present paper.

In the several weeks following the appearance of the Life article, I had to send out more than two hundred copies of a form letter in answer to inquiries about the culture-free test erroneously attributed to me. I had not invented any culture-free test, I explained, and all I had were some not at all unusual experimental techniques for studying the learning abilities of children, including children called ‘culturally disadvantaged’.

This spate of mail (and several long-distance phone calls) gave me some interesting insights into the passionate aspects of intelligence testing. Only a few of the letters were from persons writing as parents, and still fewer were from psychologists. Most were from public school people – teachers, counselors, principals, heads of school research bureaus, and administrators of special education, and the like. Some wanted further information, but mostly they wanted copies of the ‘test’ – a few ordered hundreds of ‘copies’ and sent billing numbers without even asking the price. Others were skeptical, saying they had tried everything on the market without finding a test that wiped out status or race differences but would be delighted to find any test that could really do so. One schoolman said he was in ‘hot water’ because the tests being used in his school district discriminated among groups as well as among individuals, and there were public spirited persons in the community who were quite upset by this. Somewhat more ominous to me was that the sincere expression of what might very well prove to be a false hope was accompanied in some letters by derogatory, hostile censure of conventional standardized tests – a brand of outrage which almost makes one wonder if the writers believe there are some mean, hateful persons somewhere who can be blamed for deliberately making up culturally unfair, biased tests to dis-criminate against children of the poor. It gave me mixed feelings to be praised for helping to combat this evil conspiracy!

Let me say right off that I fully agree with my correspondents that many of the problems of public education which give rise to their worries about testing are real indeed, and much must be done to solve them. But I doubt that a culture-free test – even if we had one – could do any more than highlight the problem. Of course, this in itself might be of value. As far as I can tell, problems are never resolved by tests; but tests can help to define and evaluate the problems – and I mean the crucial problems that now confront public education in its struggle to be of tangible benefit to all children in all segments of the population.

In so far as the role of culture-free tests may be involved in this endeavor, this article is my present answer to many of these misguided but nonetheless informative letters from readers of 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. (1951).

There is an even greater number of studies of racial differences in measured intelligence, most of them involving comparisons of Negroes and Caucasians. The results of the more than 380 studies of Negro intelligence up to 1965, comprehensively reviewed by Audrey Shuey (1966), are highly consistent in showing mean Negro-Caucasian IQ differences of between 10 to 20 points and an average median overlap (i.e., the percentage of Negroes exceeding the Caucasian median) of 12 per cent. In most, if not all, of these estimates racial classification is confounded with socio-economic status (SES); when the racial groups are roughly ‘matched’ on the usual SES factors, the mean IQ difference is diminished to about 10 points. The logic and validity of such ‘matching’ is, of course, highly questionable, since it involves comparing quite different proportions of the two populations, and, furthermore, SES is not strictly a causal variable in relation to IQ. But more on this point later – here I am just sketching the raw empirical findings without trying to explain them. They are the generally agreed upon results of testing with the kinds of instruments we call intelligence tests. Whether the results are ‘fair’ or not is the point at issue.

Status-fair versus culture-fair tests

What we shall be talking about here are social status differences within the same national culture. In this context the terms ‘culture-free’, ‘culture-fair’, or ‘culture-controlled’ as applied to most such tests of intelligence are really misnomers. We should be using the preferable terms ‘status-free’ or ‘status-fair’ instead. I wish to avoid extending the discussion in the present paper to the slippery problem of the cross-cultural assessment of mental abilities in primitive cultures or other essentially anthropological uses of tests for which the designation ‘culture-fair’ may constitute a legitimate use of this term. Cross-cultural testing is a complex problem in its own right, and part of what I have to say may be relevant to it, but it should be clear now that our chief concern is with test results as related to social status and ethnic background factors within a single national culture. The much more difficult subject of true cross-cultural testing will probably remain hopelessly problematical so long as the nature of the environmental differences between widely disparate cultural groups cannot be conceptualized in a generally agreed upon fashion with reference to common dimensions on which differences range. In the absence of such schemata there is the risk of perceiving and describing environments post hoc in terms of performance on particular tests, which is putting the cart before the horse. Thus, we shall stick to the more mundane task of looking at status-fair tests, and shall bypass the usual polemics in the area of cross-cultural testing, like debating how Einstein would rate on an aborigine’s ‘IQ’ test consisting of throwing boomerangs and tracking wallabies.

Why intelligence tests are like they are

It should not be forgotten that intelligence tests as we now know them evolved in close conjunction with the educational curricula and instructional methods of Europe and North America. Schooling was not simply invented in a single stroke. It has a long evolutionary history and still heavily bears the imprint of its origins in predominantly aristocratic and upper-class European society. Not only did the content of education help to shape this society, but, even more, the nature of the society shaped the content of education and the methods of instruction for imparting it. If the educational needs and goals of this upper segment of society had been different, and if their modal pattern of abilities – both innate abilities and those acquired in these peculiar environmental circumstances – were different, it seems a safe conjecture that the evolution of educational content and practices and consequently the character of public education in modern times would be quite different from what it is. And our intelligence tests – assuming we had them under these different conditions – would most likely also have taken on a different character.

The particular direction taken by education at its origins in Western European cultures emphasized a host of conditions which will largely characterize modern education: beginning formal instruction at the same age for all children – universally between 5 and 6 years of age; instruction in groups; keeping the same age groups together in a lock-step fashion at least throughout the first several years of schooling; learning under instructional conditions of relative teacher activity and pupil passivity – a showing-seeing and telling-listening relationship between teacher and pupil. This approach capitalized on the attentiveness and obedience of children in a telling-listening relationship with an adult. These habits were thoroughly inculcated in the children by their parents long before the children entered school. Of even more fundamental importance is that the success of this method of schooling depended heavily upon the child’s possession of certain abilities, both innate and acquired: an attention span long enough to encompass the teacher’s utterances and demonstrations; verbal comprehension – extracting meaning from verbal forms; ability to grasp the relationship between things or events and their symbolic representations; and, largely because of the overtly passive nature of the pupil’s role, the demand for covert activity on the pupil’s part – to repeat things to himself, to voluntarily focus his attention where it is called for; when confronted with new tasks to be learned or problems to be solved, to talk to himself in relevant ways for self-direction, for self-provided cues, for active scanning of memory stores for pertinent bits of information – in short, the capacity overtly to inhibit large-muscle activity and covertly to respond to the instructional inputs. Physical activity had to give way to mental activity – an active processing of the instructional input, not just a passive reception. To succeed, pupils had to learn not only the manifest educational content and skills explicitly imparted by the teacher, but they also had to acquire the skills of self-instruction without which group instruction by the teacher leads to little actual learning.

The interesting and important fact is that the system worked. It worked satisfactorily for the majority of children who were exposed to it, not because it was a gift of God or an inspired invention of man but for the simple reason that the class of children whom it served had largely shaped it to their capabilities. Thus, school methods were not designed. They were not imposed. They evolved. This evolution was shaped by the predominantly bookish educational content valued by the well-to-do classes of Europe and by the particular learning capabilities of their children. If the system had not worked to the satisfaction of the majority whom it served, or proved unduly frustrating to the teachers and pupils, it seems safe to say it would have evolved in a different direction.

The extension of public education over the years to an increasingly broader segment of the population, toward the goal of universal education through the twelfth grade or even beyond, has caused pressures to be exerted to change the rather highly crystallized (some would say fossilized) structure of the educational system. The system now, in fact, does appear to impose itself – often with consequent frustration and defeat – on many in our population whose cultural and racial forebears played no part in the evolution of the system.

Returning now to the subject of intelligence tests, my contention is that our definitions of intelligence and our methods of measuring it have been significantly shaped by the schools and the historical and geographical factors involved in their development. Intelligence tests, as we all know, were originally made to be able to rank-order children in terms of their probable success in profiting from the traditional curriculum under the traditional methods of school instruction. They were not intended to measure the typical outcomes of such instruction, but to assess, by means relatively independent of scholastic performance, the probable scholastic attainments of children given more or less the same standard instruction in school.

Tests were made to perform this function very well indeed, and despite many auxiliary advances in test theory and test construction, the high predictive power of intelligence tests for scholastic performance has remained essentially unchanged for decades.

Psychologists became interested in intelligence as more than just scholastic ability and devised tests which could rank persons along a supposedly broader ‘bright-dull’ continuum, differences which are intuitively, though roughly, recognized by nearly all persons who thoughtfully observe other persons – at play, at school, and at work. Various terms designating roughly agreed upon differences along such a continuum have been used throughout recorded history and probably longer. Without specifying precisely what the be...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Hierarchical theories of mental ability
• The culturally disadvantaged: psychological and educational aspects
• Understanding readiness
• The role of verbal mediation in mental development
• Another look at culture-fair testing
• Selection of minority students in higher education
• Do schools cheat minority children?
• Varieties of individual differences in learning
• Can we and should we study race differences?
• The phylogeny and ontogeny of intelligence
• The heritability of intelligence
• Heritability and teachability
• References
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX