Guidelines for testing minority group children [microform] / Joshua Fishman and Others.
Educators possess special service and instructional skills which, if used wisely, can assist minority group children in overcoming their early disadvantages. Educational psychological tests may help if they are carefully and intelligently employed. Professional training and diagnostic sensitivity ar...
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| Format: | Microfilm Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
[S.l.] :
Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse,
1963.
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| Summary: | Educators possess special service and instructional skills which, if used wisely, can assist minority group children in overcoming their early disadvantages. Educational psychological tests may help if they are carefully and intelligently employed. Professional training and diagnostic sensitivity are required. Standardized tests currently in use present three principal difficulties when used with disadvantaged minority groups. First, they may not provide reliable differentiation in the range of minority group scores. Also, many characteristics of minority group children affect test performance. The lower-class child will tend to be less verbal, less self-confident, less motivated toward academic achievement, less competitive intellectually, less exposed to stimulating materials in the home, less knowledgeable about the world, and more fearful of strangers than the middle class child. The second difficulty is that the significance of the tests for predictive purposes may be quite different for the minority groups than for the standardization and validation groups. Factors that affect the test scores but which may have little relation to the criterion, such as test-taking skills, anxiety and motivation, may impair predictive validity. Also, the criteria which a test is predicting are usually more complex than the test itself. It is important to recognize the influence of such other factors as personality and background, which may be related to criterion performance. Test results cannot reveal the degree to which the status of disadvantaged children might change if environmental opportunities and incentives for learning were improved. Guidance and special training are therefore very important. Tests labeled "culturally unfair" may be valid predictors for school criteria which may be socially unfair. Most "culture free" tests have low predictive validity for academic work. |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Document Number: ED001649. |
| Physical Description: | 27 p. |
| Reproduction Note: | Microfiche. |
| Action Note: | committed to retain |