Intelligence Testing Issues

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 int

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a measure of innate cognitive ability. Further, IQs often over-estimate the intelligence of culturally dominate groups (Williams, 1974). In other words, intelligence tests are not only biased against the culturally deprived and ethnic minorities, they are also biased in favor of the culturally dominant group. In addition, there are problems regarding the predictive validity of IQ tests. Anastasi (1989) reports that IQs do not accurately predict either the future behaviors or the achievements of any cultural group. Also, there exists a great deal of disagreement among investigators as to what is actually being predicted by IQ tests (Helms, 1992). Another difficulty with intelligence tests, according to Papalia and Olds (1992) is that test developers' decisions about what constitutes a correct answer often fail to sample the entire domain of intelligent responses. An example of this can be seen by examining one of the items on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale for four to six year olds. This item asks children, "What is a house made of?" If a child answers that a house is made of walls and ceilings and floors, the answer is considered incorrect; this because the answer must contain building materials such as bric
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