Iq Tests And Cultural Bias

One would assume that intelligence testing in the United States began with psychiatrists or government officials. It was actually a football coach who coached the University of South California at the start of the century. He

     Since the development of the intelligence quotient, schools in every part of the world have been using the IQ test to categorize millions of students into three groups. These three groups, which are the gifted, the average, and the retarded, are falsifications that perpetuate in our world culture and cause many gifted students to be deemed retarded and vice a versa. Why then is the IQ test so heavily relied on in our school systems? For schools the answer is simple, an I.Q. test is a reliable predictor of a students later performance in academics. This answer is relatively true, but where the I.Q. test falls extremely short is with testing the multiple

A further refinement of the Stanford-Binet scale and translation (for American culture) was published in 1916 by Lewis M. Terman, who adopted Stern’s proposal that an individual's intelligence level be measured as an intelligence quotient (I. Q.). The IQ score presumably represented an individual’s rate of mental development as a quotient, between "mental age" and actual "chronological age" times 100 (to remove the decimal). Terman's test, known colloquially as the Stanford-Binet test, formed the basis for modern intelligence

Labeling bias exists when a test claims to measure one thing but actually measures something else. Tests that claim to assess such traits as “aptitude” or “intelligence” imply that they are measuring something innate, given that many people assume that these traits are genetic. However, Jencks notes that “almost all psychologists now agree that while an individual’s score on an intelligence or aptitude test depends partly on his or her genetic makeup, it also reflects a multitude of environmental influences” (p. 56). Thus, such tests are racially biased estimates of the innate traits that most laypeople think these tests are purporting to evaluate. Fortunately, this bias can be eliminated by simply changing the names of what these tests claim to measure.

Testing has been used for centuries in many different ways, not just to test student intelligence levels. According to an article written in Time, the earliest form of a standardized test comes from China where government leaders would be tested on their knowledge of Confucius and poetry. The article continues with the inclusion of testing during the Industrial Revolution. The testing during this period took children who were not in school and measured their knowledge of subjects that students in schools learned. As time went on, more and more advances came to the testing scene. New products included a revised version of the test, called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, and professionals developed the test scanner by 1936. These inventions improved the time necessary to receive results from an IQ test. Today, tests, like the

Also, in the early 1900’s there were different intelligence test conducted mainly to “justify racial and ethnic discrimination”. According to the understanding race website, “The results of these intelligence tests were influential in shaping U.S. immigration policy that limited immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and in justifying race-based segregation in public education, and U.S. conscription during World War I. Previously, the scientific debate centered largely on perceived differences in racial intelligence based on cranial size”. (Science: 1900s-1930s Race and Intelligence)

The issue of cultural bias in intelligence tests sparks debates every time the latter is created or administered, resulting to many researches into how the reliability and validity of an ability test may differ when assessed on groups from different cultural-linguistic backgrounds. The aim of this study is to test the reliability and validity of the PSYGAT Verbal IQ Test on university students from English-speaking backgrounds (ESB) and non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) in relation to the Queendom Verbal IQ Test and Cultural Fair IQ Test. 445 third year psychology students aged 19 to 62 were involved in this

Binet was involved in creating one of the more recent forms of intelligence test, referred to as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. A similar test is that formulated by Wechsler (Neisser et al. 1996). These led to the measure of IQ (“intelligence quotient”) being founded, where an individual’s “mental age is divided by their chronological age and multiplied by 100” (Gardner 2006, p. 3). The tests measure intelligence through verbal and non-verbal tasks, assessing scholastic aptitude, school achievement and specific abilities (Neisser et al. 1996, p. 78).

Some racial groups value hunting knowledge because they are required to hunt for their food for survival, and some increase their chances of survival if they have the academic intelligence to succeed in a paid job. Considering this, standardised IQ tests fail to create statistically comparable results due to the fact that each race places different loadings of importance on different abilities (Sternberg, Grigorenko, & Kidd, 2005). It would be unreasonable to expect an Amazonian tribe member to understand a question such as “which design best completes the sequence?” for example, because this may not be the language or type of question they are accustomed to (Reynolds & Suzuki, 2012). Yet failure to understand such questions might affect their score and imply they are unintelligent according to a standardised IQ test. This is known as a ‘test bias’, because the issue lies within the construction of the measuring tool rather than a lack of intellect (Sternberg, 1980). As this example highlights, it is necessary to acknowledge racial differences in scientific endeavours in order to achieve total congruency, due to the diversity of cultural values.

“Blacks still score below 75 percent of American whites on most standardized tests” (Jencks and Phillips). The belief that intelligence and aptitude are innate seems to be especially important in discussions of racial differences (Jencks and Phillips 6). White Americans score closer on IQ tests to other white populations across the globe than to the worldwide black average (Saletan 1). An important question that may come to mind is whether intelligence tests biased. Intelligence tests are likely to be culturally biased when a standardized test reflects what is learned through experience in a culture that does not regard to another race as highly (Young). For instance, if a standardized test result represented an ingroup preference exclusively than it may only measure a specific part of intelligence; for example the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, WAIS, is more verbal while the Raven's Progressive Matrices, RPM, is more visual (Young). This may cause a majority of individuals with autism to do better on the RPM due to autistic students connecting with images rather than words. Young has stated that intelligence tests that only focus on certain neurological criterias and are not well indicators of intelligence due to it not equally indicating all types of intellect. Yet a majority of psychologists now agree that intelligence tests measure developed

In the early 1900s, IQ test was originally developed by the French psychologist, Alfred Binet.

The methods they were using to measure intelligence tests were a bit biased towards Western intelligence because Western culture value speed and other culture value perfection even if it means taking long to complete the tests. To address this anomaly, ‘culture free test` was used to take away the things that affected performance due to cultural differences. They also used ‘culture fair test` to measure common skills

In 1905 Binet and Simon tested their measurements on another fifty children whom their school teachers considered to be of average intelligence for their ages. This test was to enable Binet to examine the levels of intelligent behaviors between children of the same age. Some of the tests on Binets scale were very simple, including asking a child to follow the direction of movement of a lighted match, and then maybe slightly harder was to repeat back a three digit sequence of numbers or sentences. There were a few harder tests involved which would require a child to make a sentence out of maybe three or four words, or to reproduce a drawing from memory.

Binet argued forcefully against the idea that intelligence is fixed or innate: "We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism (Lewontin, Rose, & Kamen, 1984)." However, those who translated his test into English tended to disagree, arguing that the test measured an innate and immutable, genetically inherited characteristic. After Binet's death in 1911, the Galtonian eugenicists assumed control, shifting the focus firmly toward genetic explanations by insisting that differences in intelligence between social classes and races were due to inherent genetic differences.

Binet. Another key individual in the development of intelligence is Alfred Binet, who was a very influential psychologist of the early twentieth century. He was a French psychologist who is known especially for his work with intelligence and is remembered as the father of the first intelligence test (Binet, 1903). He was a self-taught psychologist who was studying medicine (but did not finish his medical studies) and later shifted into psychology because it was much an interest to him (Zusne, 1957). He was interested in the development of his children and in 1903 he published a book L’étude expérimentale de I’intelligence (Binet, 1903) which included empirical data of the observations he made with his children and an extensive