nicole kotras masters thesis

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(GQ) and in their performance on four of the six scales, namely the Locomotor development,
Personal-Social development, Hearing and Speech, and Performance.
Children in the different SES groups differed significantly on the GQ and in their
performance on four of the six scales, namely the Hearing and Speech, Eye Hand
Co-ordination, Performance and Practical-Reasoning scales. On the Hearing and Speech,
Eye and Co-ordination, and Practical- Reasoning scales, children from the upper SES group
performed significantly better than those from both the middle and lower SES groups. On
the performance scale and GQ, the upper SES group scored significantly higher than the
middle and lower SES groups, and the middle SES group scored significantly higher than
the lower SES group. Hence, Allan (1988) was of the opinion that socio-economic status be
taken into account in the interpretation of the Scales.
Allan (1992) completed a comparative study on the performance of South African
normal pre-school children on the Griffiths Scales. The study was aimed at extending
previous research findings, by comparing the performance of South African Black, Coloured,
Indian and White children on the Griffiths Scales. The sample (N = 200) consisted of
children between 5 and 6 years of age. The applicability of the present British norms for
South African children from the different cultural groups was also investigated. Furthermore,
the extent to which the subject variables of gender, language and SES influence the test
performance of these children, was investigated. An analysis of the performance of children
from the four cultural groups on the items of the individual scales, was also conducted in an
attempt to identify culturally-loaded items. With regards to the Hearing and Speech Scale,
the results indicated that no consistent, significantly higher scores were found for children
from a specific cultural groups. There were no significant differences between the cultural
groups with respect to the General Quotient (GQ) and to their performance on the
Personal-Social scale (BQ) and the Practical-Reasoning scale (FQ). With respect to the
other four individual scales, the Coloured and Black groups did not differ significantly from
each other. However, their performance differed significantly from that of the Indian and
White groups. There were also significant differences in the performance of the Indian and
White groups with respect to the latter four individual scales. There were no significant
differences in the test performance of English- and Afrikaans- speaking Coloured children.
However, the only individual scale on which White English-speaking children scored
significantly higher, was on the Hearing and Speech Scale. This finding does not