Culture-Fair Test Assessment

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses an article by Raymond Zurcher, "Issues and Trends in Culture-Fair Assessment" that evaluates the degree of cultural bias in group achievement tests and individual IQ tests, reviews other writers, refers to statutes and case law and research on the topic and mentions tests that have been designed to be culture-neutral.The author states, as an example of culture bias, that while minority students are exposed to the majority culture, very often majority students are not exposed in depth to minority culture; therefore, a white student might not know that in African-American neighborhoods a brick might be called an "alley apple." The author feels that Zurche's opinion was supported by other opinions, not controlled research; research is needed on this topic.

From the Paper:

"Zurcher also discussed two issues that might be more serious -- "Slope Bias" and "Intercept Bias." Slope Bias happens when the test has less validity for minority students than students in the majority culture. Zurcher quoted Anastasi, who noted that correlations might be statistically significant for one part of society but not another. Presumably, these differences could occur across socio-economic lines as well as cultural lines, although that was not mentioned. Zurcher explained "Intercept Bias" as what occurs when test scores under predict for a specific group. Examples might be using I. Q. scores to predict achievement, or college admission scores to predict performance in college. One way this can happen, he said, was if the test items did not reflect the task it was attempting to predict."

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• Essay # 70230 : "Cultural Bias in Testing"
• Persuasive Essay # 149571 : "In Support of Standardized Tests"

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