ackground be compared only to students of the same or highly similar backgrounds.
To provide educators and behavioral scientists with a means of comparing student groups to their own cultural groups, Mercer (1979) developed the System of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment (SOMPA) through which performance on the WISC-R is assessed in relation to that of groups with similar social and cultural backgrounds. Evaluations of SOMPA have shown that the assessment procedure results in fewer children with culturally deprived backgrounds being assigned to remedial services or classes on the grounds of below-normal intelligence (Mercer, 1988); in other words, her system appears to have overcome, at least to some extent, bias toward culturally deprived groups.
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