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

360 Educability and Group Differences
correlate negatively with IQ differences between certain groups.
On all of the many measurable factors which environmentalists
have invoked to explain the Negro-white IQ difference, both
American Indians and Mexican-Americans have been found to
be much more disadvantaged than Negroes. Yet on non-verbal
intelligence tests (which are more fair for bilingual groups such as
Mexicans and Indians) and in scholastic performance, Indians and
Mexicans significantly outperform Negroes. This finding is neutral
with respect to genetic theory, in the sense that no prediction could
have been derived from genetic principles; but it contradicts those
environmental theories that invoke measurable environmental
factors known to correlate with IQ within population groups as
the cause of the lower Negro IQ. The only attempts of environmentalists
to rationalize these findings have invoked highly
speculative cultural and attitudinal factors which have not yet been
shown to be correlated either with IQ or with race.
Culture-biased Tests
Intelligence tests can be rank-ordered according to certain generally
agreed upon criteria of their cultural loading. Within a given
culture, tests are better described as differing in status fairness.
Environmentalists who criticize intelligence tests usually give as
examples those tests which are most obviously loaded with what is
presumably white, middle-class factual knowledge, vocabulary,
and the like, as contrasted with more abstract figural material such
as compose Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Cattell’s Culture-
Fair Tests of g. Yet it is on the latter type of tests that Negroes
perform most poorly, relative to whites and to other minority
groups. Disadvantaged minorities, such as American Indians and
Mexican-Americans, perform on tests showing different degrees
of status bias in accord with the environmentalist hypothesis.
Negroes do the opposite. ‘Translation’ of tests such as the Stanford-
Binet into the Negro ghetto dialect also does not improve scores.
The scholastic and occupational predictive validity of IQ tests
is the same for Negroes as for whites, and item analyses of tests
showing large average group mean differences do not reveal
significant differences in rank order of item difficulty or in choice
of distractors for error responses. Test-taking attitudes and
motivational factors appear unconvincing as an explanation of the
group difference in view of the fact that on some tests which make