holds that there are at least five categories of test bias that are necessary to explain before looking at the case of specific ethnic groups. These are the cultural-specificness of the test, the test situation, teacher expectation, health and nutritional factors, and the perceived usefulness of performance on the test itself.
Intelligence and psychological tests are designed to access ability, not factual information. However, it has become increasingly apparent that intelligence tests seem to measure the knowledge, habits, and modes of thinking within a particular cultural bias - all of which are learned behaviors. Since the cultural bias is usually White, ethnic individuals are often unprepared and unable to perform well on these types of tests (Ogbu, 1978; Berger, 1978).
Besides the content of the test, the test situation has shown that the formality expected may actually lower the scores of poor and ethnic children. In addition, there may also be a linguistic bias in the test directions, both those given verbally and those written on the test (
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