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Critics of intelligence tests claim that one reason that African Americans and other minorities score
lower is that the tests are written in a “foreign” language. The test instructions and questions,
written in “standard” English and testing “standard” concepts, may not make sense to children
who use a different (but not inferior) language to deal with “nonstandard” concepts.
To illustrate the gap between standard English and “black” English, sociologist Adrian Dove
developed the Dove Counterbalance General Intelligence Test (1968), a set of 30 multiple-choice
questions. This test, also known as the “chitling test,” uses “Black English” to test knowledge of
black cultural concepts. For example, could you respond to the following?
Questions:
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CHAPTER 10: INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT
. What is a “blood”?
. “Bird or yardbird” was the jacket jazz lovers from coast to coast hung on _____?
. Do you know the difference between a “gray” and a “spook”?
Answers:
. A “blood” refers to someone of African American descent.
. Charlie Parker, who spent time in prison, was nicknamed “Bird.”
. “Grays” are pale-faced whites and “spooks” are African Americans.
Based on just this minimal information, it would seem that American “whites” and American
“blacks” are people separated by a common language! Psychologist Robert L. Williams feels that
the differences in language can be much subtler than the Black English used on test items on the
chitling test. He and L. Wendell Rivers designed a study to measure the actual effect of this
language gap on IQ scores (1972). They enlisted the aid of African American teachers and graduate
students to translate the instructions of an IQ test into nonstandard English. The test they used was
the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC), an IQ test that asks children to mark the picture that
matches a concept of time, space, or quantity. Their participants were 890 African American
children attending either kindergarten or first or second grade. The children were divided into two
groups, and the psychologists controlled for the variables of the scores received on other IQ tests,
age, sex, and grade level. One half was given the standard version of the Boehm and one half was
given the nonstandard version. Results were stated as follows.
“The children who took the nonstandard version scored significantly higher than those who
took the test with the standard instructions. What is surprising is that the nonstandard
instructions seem to differ little from the standard version. For example, the instructions on the
standard version read “behind the sofa,” while the nonstandard version asked the child to
mark a picture of something that was “in back of the couch.”
The Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (the BITCH test) was Williams’ next
experiment in designing a culture-specific test for African Americans. Williams administered 100
vocabulary items, selected from a slang dictionary and his personal experiences, to a group of 200
sixteen- to eighteen-year-old participants, half of whom were African American and half of whom
were white. On this IQ test, the whites got lower scores, an average score of 51, compared to an
average of 87 for the African Americans.
As Williams demonstrated, psychologists can develop a test that favors a particular group rather
easily. However, the problem that has confronted the designers of tests is how to design a test that
will apply to all groups fairly. Moreover, after the test is designed, how do we best use the data it
provides?