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

304 Educability and Group Differences
motivation, but makes no demands on reasoning or abstract
conceptual abilities.
One of the most status-fair tests, at least for children who are
in school and have had experience with paper and pencil, is the
Figure Copying Test (see Figure 3.1, p. 78). The child is asked
merely to copy the ten forms, each on a separate page, while they
are in full view, without time limit. The children’s drawings can
be scored with a high degree of reliability for correspondence to
the model and for maturity of the drawing. In factor analyses
carried out separately in white, Negro, and Mexican samples, this
test has a substantial g loading in all groups, comparable to that
of Raven’s Matrices. The test scores of kindergarten children also
are prognostic of readiness for the traditional school learning tasks
of the primary grades. The high level of motivation elicited by
this test is indicated by the fact that the minimum score obtained
in each group at each grade level increases systematically. This
suggests that all children are making an attempt to perform in
accordance with the instructions. Also, virtually 100 percent of
the children in every ethnic group at every grade level attempted
to copy every figure. The attempts, even when totally unsuccessful,
show considerable effort, as indicated by the re-drawing of the
figure, erasures and drawing over the figure repeatedly, in order
to improve its likeness to the model. It is also noteworthy about
this test that normal children are generally not successful in
drawing figures beyond their mental age level, and special instruction,
coaching and practice in drawing these figures hardly improves
the child’s performance. Figure 17.2 shows the scores on this test
of several ethnic and social class groups totalling nearly ten
thousand children in kindergarten to fourth grade in twenty-one
California schools. The four ethnic groups are Oriental (O),
White (W), Mexican (M), and Negro (N). The letter ‘U’ represents
schools in an urban, relatively upper-status community
socioeconomically as compared with the average school district
in California; ‘L’ represents schools in comparatively lower-status
rural districts. The groups are ranked on a composite index of
socioeconomic status (SES), with SES 1 as the highest, representing
largely professional and business-managerial upper-middleclass
families. Note that the rank order of SES does not strictly
correspond to the rank order of performance in Figure Copying.
The Orientals exceed all other groups, and the Mexicans, who