FACTORS INVOLVED IN THE TESTING OF MINORITY GROUP CHILDREN ARE PRESENTED. THE CONVENTIONAL INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL TESTING ARE TOO OFTEN DEVELOPED FOR THE INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL WAYS OF MIDDLE-CLASS CHILDREN. AS A RESULT MINORITY GROUP CHILDREN ARE EXCLUDED FROM OPPORTUNITIES FOR TRAINING BECAUSE OF "CULTURAL DEPRIVATION." THE GUIDE…

PERSONALITY VARIATIONS AMONG LOWER-CLASS CHILDREN WERE EXPLORED BY (1) DEVISING AND REFINING THEORY-RELEVANT METHODS OF PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT AND (2) USING THESE METHODS TO INVESTIGATE DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE AND TO ORGANIZE PROGRAMS OF DIFFERENTIAL EDUCATIONAL TREATMENTS. GROUPS OF SEVERAL HUNDRED STUDENTS FROM A "CULTURALLY DEPRIVED"…

EDUCATORS MUST UNDERSTAND THE CULTURAL CONFLICT BETWEEN THE LOWER CLASS CHILD AND THE ESSENTIALLY MIDDLE CLASS SCHOOL AND ADAPT CERTAIN SCHOOL PRACTICES TO CONSTRUCTIVELY ACCOMODATE THE WEAKNESSES AND STRENGTHS OF THE CULTURALLY DIFFERENT STUDENT. FOR EXAMPLE, SINCE THE LOWER CLASS STUDENT DOES NOT VALUE THE COMPETITION AND SCHOLASTIC ACHIEVEMENT…

Discussed are some sociological theories about instability in black ghettos, the Negro social class structure, and some policy implications derived from such analyses. The point of departure for this document is Norton Long's theory that ghetto unrest is a result of the absence of a black middle class. The consequent lack of Negro middle class…

This conference report is made up of six papers and related commentaries on the nature of disadvantagement and its implications. Most participants were from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area. Small group meetings and discussions followed each of the papers. The opening paper, "Education and the Disadvantaged" (E. Melby), examined a broad…

A group of 105 lower-lower middle class kindergarten children were tested on a set of single variable classification tasks and related-component tasks dealing with color and number. Children who failed to reach criterion on the classification test were randomly assigned to one of five experimental groups, stratified on the basis of performance on…

The purpose of this study was to validate the Teacher's Assessment of Students' Aptitudes Form (TASAF), an instrument devised to guide teachers assessment of students' aptitudes through the observation of their classroom behaviors, i.e., to what extent were teachers able to detect levels of differential aptitudes in their students through guided…

The effects of live and symbolic modeling on the conservation of equalities and inequalities were studied with items spanning three stimulus dimensions (length, number, and two dimensional space). A total of 48 kindergarten children, who had failed to conserve on any equality items in baseline measures, were randomly assigned, in equal groups, to…

The question discussed in this paper is: if middle class children and lower class children were matched on the basis of scores on an intelligence test, would one social class group achieve its scores on a different item set than would the other social class group? This study was first carried out on data collected in the Fall, 1967 and replicated…

The last of a series of teacher education units discusses techniques for teaching reading and writing to culturally disadvantaged students. The poor reading ability of such students is related to their cultural backgrounds which prepared them inadequately for reading instruction in a middle-class oriented curriculum. Therefore, remedial…

This University of California, Los Angeles, Fernald School project was designed to evaluate the impact of an intensive, individualized remedial program upon the learning skills of disadvantaged children. In addition to the focus on learning skills, aspiration levels and self-attitudes, a second objective was to compare learning problems of…

This report describes a study instituted to determine whether attitude scales standardized on a white population falter when applied to black subjects. The subjects were 656 white and black college students, 457 of these being middle class white students, 29 middle class black students, and 70 lower class black students. Eight semantic…

The purpose of this study was to generate a library of 198 specimen records of the behavior of 24 3-year-old children in different socioeconomic environments: low income urban, low income rural, and middle income urban. (A specimen record provides a continuous narrative in natural language of the behavior of an individual together with the…

A study was conducted of how children's expectations for their own school performance develop over their first-grade year and what factors influence these expectations. Expectations for performance in reading and arithmetic were studied. Both middle class and lower class (black and white) children have higher expectations than their subsequent…

Research examined the learning effects that encouraging Israeli mothers to co-observe Sesame Street with their five-year-olds had. The mechanism which mediated such effects was also investigated. A total of 93 kindergarten children, drawn about equally from lower and middle class families, was divided between mothers' encouraged and non-encouraged…