Adventuring - The Bear Creek Commentaries

--- Intelligence 2 ---

Again, Cynthia Wooding's module, "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in African American Students" presents group activities to help African American students counteract biases in standard American educational systems by highlighting role models from the African American community that exemplified the analytical, creative, and practical approaches to intelligence.

The culturally biased testing issue was still going strong while I was a professional vocational evaluator and I'm not so sure it was ever resolved. I did give culturally unbiased test, because they were requested by counselors. And, yes, there was a cultural bias problem with the "classical" tests. Unfortunately, the culturally unbiased tests were lame.

The ones that I had to give produced minimal useful information that made me ask, "What am I measuring here?" Again, I dutifully gave the tests, along with informative additional tests and drew lots of useful information from extensive interviews, and I thoroughly deprecated the tests that I had to give in the report.

One counselor was in love with an scholastic aptitude test that had a reading level about 6 grades above the reading abilities of the clients I was testing.

(Sigh)

In the end, there are no culturally biased (or culturally unbiased) tests. There are only culturally biased evaluations performed by individuals who don't know how to design and interpret individualized evaluations.