EVIDENCE OF BIAS IN THE WAIS: A COMPARISON OF BLACKS AND WHITES.
Item
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Title
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EVIDENCE OF BIAS IN THE WAIS: A COMPARISON OF BLACKS AND WHITES.
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Identifier
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AAI8423050
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identifier
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8423050
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Creator
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ALNE, DENNIS JAMES.
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Contributor
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David Rindskopf
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Education, Educational Psychology | Black Studies
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Abstract
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Recently there has been increasing concern over the use of individually administered intelligence tests for making educational decisions regarding minority groups. It has been contended that these tests are biased against blacks (Williams, 1971), and their use in the evaluation of black students has led to underestimating actual intelligence. Due to this underestimation, inappropriate educational decisions are being made (Williams, 1974).;Beginning in the late 1970s researchers began to pay serious attention to investigating such contentions. Previous studies of bias in the Wechsler scales, have been on younger children. For this, and other reasons, the WAIS was evaluated in the present study.;Data was collected on 358 black and 256 white high school students. The students had been referred to school psychologists for an evaluation of learning and or behavior problems. All evaluations took place between January 1980, and June 1982.;Consistent with the literature, the definition of test bias followed in the present study is that a test is biased if two individuals of equal ability, but of different group membership, do not have equal probability of obtaining the same test scores. Based on this definition several hypotheses regarding test bias were investigated.;While the groups were found to differ significantly in factor structure, some measure of differences were expected due to uncontrollable factors. Further, the difference between the white and black samples were not nearly as great as the differences in factor structure between the present white sample and a normal white sample. In addition, the direction of item bias did not favor one group significantly more often than the other when the usual internal criterion of ability was used to match groups.;In view of the findings it was concluded that the WAIS has comparable internal validity for the two samples, but is a better measure of a global factor of intelligence for whites in this study. This last finding is supportive of the contention that more blacks than whites in the present sample may be misdiagnosed as mildly retarded, and reinforces the importance of including other data when making this diagnosis in minorities.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Educational Psychology
