Clearly, it is not a wise move to curtail intelligence testing for all children simply because it is unfair to some children. Instead, steps need to be taken to ensure that culturally deprived children are tested in an honest and fair manner. In this regard, the key issues and considerations that must be addressed involve determining what actions will lead to the attainment of fair testing for the culturally deprived student group.
One step that might be taken is to review intelligence tests research for those tests that have been established in the literature as being fair to culturally deprived students. For example, the Kaufman Assessment Battery For Children, often termed the "K-ABC" (Kaufman, Kamphaus & Kaufman, 1985) has been repeatedly tested and found to be highly applicable to diverse student groups including cultural and ethnic minorities. According to Taylor (1990), the K-ABC is considered to be a more culturally fair test because: (1) its measures are less culturally dependent than those of traditional intelligence tests; and (2) it focuses on problem-solving rather than item content. In addition to the foregoing, the K-ABC has been found to have high levels of validity and reliability (Reynolds, Kamphaus & Rosenthal, 1989).
Another step that can be taken to rectify the situation is to use cultural rather than age comparison norms. This action was originally proposed by Mercer (1979) as a way of overcoming the cultural bias found in many standard intelligence tests (e.g., the Stanford-Binet, the Wechsler Scales).
According to Mercer (1979), all cultural groups have roughly the same average intellectual potential. On any given IQ test, members of a cultural minority may score low, not because of actual lower intelligence, but because, owing to cultural differences, they are less familiar with the tasks which the test requires. To overcome this problem, Mercer suggests that students of a given cultural b...