A Socialization-Mediated Self-Defeating Model for Evaluation of Black-White Performance Differences on Intelligence Test Batteries

Black children are strikingly overrepresented in special educational programs. For example, 43 percent of the black children in New Jersey’s public school system were classified as Educable Mentally Retarded (EMR) at a time when black children comprised only 17.8 percent of the public school population.1 Disproportionately large numbers of black children have thus been placed in special instructional tracks, a phenomenon not exclusive to the New Jersey educational system. Serving as the basis for cognitive ability labels such as EMR, psychometric intelligence tests are the preponderant diagnostic tool for assessing childhood intelligence and consistently yield substantial black-white performance differences favoring whites.2 Cognitive measures that reduce this black performance disadvantage have been developed, including the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC). Although the K-ABC appears to be a more racially equitable battery, it is argued that the K-ABC is not a better psychometric test of mental ability because it does not sufficiently measure a purported general intelligence factor, or g.3 First, I will confirm that classical intelligence tests such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) and Stanford-Binet do in fact assess this so-called g factor more than the K-ABC; that is, they are more highly g loaded. Second, however, I will discuss the nature and calculation of a test’s g loading and illustrate that highly g loaded mental measures assess critical relational thinking and abstract cognitive processing abilities. Third, I will argue that black children are likely to fail these types of tasks because their socialization experiences do not include a maternally created “zone of proximal development” that prepares them for the mental manipulations required by highly g loaded tests. I propose that once this failure occurs, anxiety effects interfere with subsequent black test performance. That is to say, fourth, I will demonstrate that black children enter the testing milieu with high anxiety due to their black-specific socialization experiences. As a result of this high test anxiety, once blacks fail a number of test items that are highly g loaded, they perform even more poorly on subsequent items because content-specific difficulties are compounded by high anxiety-mediated interference. More precisely, fifth, I will show that black children experience a paramount desire to exit the high anxiety testing environment rather than persist trying on subsequent-to-failure test items. Attribution theory will allow us to conclude that the internal attributions that black children generate for their failure may particularly hinder their continued exertion of trying behaviors. Such lack of persistence is of course self-defeating because it will proffer black children with depressed intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, thereby creating the blackwhite performance disparity. Since the proposed original cause for this black performance disadvantage is the high g A Socialization-Mediated Self-Defeating Model for Evaluation of Black-White Performance Differences on Intelligence Test Batteries J. Undergrad. Sci. 3: 89-101 (Summer 1996)