Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

300 Educability and Group Differences
Item difficulty then is controlled by the complexity of the mental
operations with the equally familiar materials needed to find the
answer. One of the pioneering attempts at this, now of historical
interest, is the defunct Davis-Eells Games, developed in 1951.
The items, represented as games, were cartoons of children doing
ordinary things in very familiar settings; in fact, the settings were
more typical of a lower-class environment than of a middle-class
environment. No reading was required and the tests were untimed
- features thought to favor lower SES relative to middle SES
children. Practical judgment and commonsense inferences are
called for in solving most of the problems. One cartoon, for
example, shows three panels, each depicting a boy trying to get
over a high backyard fence. One boy is piling up boxes and rubbish
cans in a most unstable fashion, one is futilely jumping and one is
stacking boxes in a stable fashion. The testee simply marks the
picture he thinks shows the best method for getting over the fence.
But in order to increase item difficulty with such familiar materials,
the problem situations had to be made increasingly complex in
the inferences and judgments called for in order to solve them.
Logical reasoning was needed, though it always involved only
commonplace practical situations. But the test was entirely
unsuccessful in the view of those who had hoped it might eliminate
social class and racial differences in mean performance. Group
differences approximately equal to those found wdth the ordinary
standard IQ tests were found with the Davis-Eells Games. Since
they essentially failed in their main purpose and had certain
psychometric defects as well, the games were dropped.
Subsequent attempts along the same lines were made by Davis
and his co-workers, using items believed to be intrinsically
motivating, similar to real-life situations, equally familiar to all
social classes, and without time limits. But these tests, too, yielded
lower scores for Negroes, lower, in fact, than found for low-status
whites. As of the present time, no one yet has succeeded in
devising a test that does not discriminate between representative
samples of Negroes and whites and which also can be show'n to
have any g loading (which is essentially the complexity factor) or
any validity in terms of correlation with any external educational
or occupational criteria. If group differences were due to cultural
bias in the test and not to true differences in intelligence, it should
be possible to devise culturally appropriate tests that eliminate