A review of the use and abuse, it is stated, of tests administered to qualify persons for employment, focusing on their effect on equal opportunity, noting that most debates on fair tests use revolve around a conflict in value systems -- those which emphasize merit, and seek to minimize errors of selection, versus those which emphasize equality.…

Problems of using standardized tests with multicultural/multilingual Alaskan native students include cultural bias and examiner bias. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) was administered to 320 Alaskan native children in an attempt to establish local norms for the WISC-R. Results showed that bicultural/bilingual children…

Most attempts to correct for the presence of biased test items in a measurement instrument have been either to remove the items or to adjust the scores to correct for the bias. Using the Rasch Dichotomous Response Model and the independent ability estimates derived from three sets of items, those which favor females, those which favor males, and…

Practical and theoretical issues regarding assessment and treatment alternatives for Black exceptional children are presented, including: problems in the evaluation of assessment practices; a review of critiques of large and small studies on assessment practices of Black children, with emphasis upon the insights they yield for improved assessment…

Establishment of the new Law and Education Center (LEC) at the Education Commission of the States is announced in this document. It notes that the LEC offers preventive legal assistance to state educational programs and that it will focus on a limited number of specific legal issues. The central topic of this initial newsletter is competency…

Item bias in the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Revised) was investigated using black, white, and Hispanic learning disabled children. Samples of 112 blacks, 126 whites, and 117 Hispanics were matched on subtest raw score and sex. An item-by-group analysis of variance was computed on delta transformed item means for each of nine…

The author discusses his observations from administering such tests as the Denver Developmental Screening Test (DDST) to young disabled children in Costa Rica. Cultural influences and nuances of translations are seen to affect performance. Factors involved in remediation programing are also noted. A final consideration is the "barrio…

The paper discusses test bias; presents the rationale of the System of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment (SOMPA), a test instrument which assumes equal cultural and racial intellectual potential but asserts that there is not one normal curve of measured intellectual performance; and suggests that the test would correct racial and cultural test…

Mastery of sixteen "life skills" tasks will be a Seattle Public Schools graduation requirement beginning in 1981. Five forms of the Minimum Competencies Performance Test, which will be used to measure mastery of those tasks, are presently being developed and field tested. This report presents the results of the analysis of the first…

Although cultural content is unavoidable as a backdrop for good language testing, cultural bias in testing English as a second language presents many dangers. A picture cue calling for a correct grammatical response may evoke an incorrect answer if the pictorial content is culturally coded. The cultural background behind a test must be accurately…

This paper presents the purpose, format, topics of seminar sessions, and participant recommendations of a conference on educational testing processes and their relation to blacks. The conference was held to familiarize participants with research data demonstrating the fallacies and inconsistencies inherent in the testing process as it relates to…

A nonstandard analysis of covariance (homogeneity of regression not assumed) was performed on 23 black-white item comparisons that had manifested bias according to an item X group interaction definition of bias, and on 9 black-white comparisons that had not manifested bias, to determine whether item bias is reduced for white and black examinees…

The paper reviews the literature on the problem of testing Spanish-speaking children with North American Instruments, and suggests some solutions to the problem. In the first section, studies done with Spanish-speaking children are considered; studies of other cultures follow; and a final section probes the issue of test bias. (Author/SBH)

The purpose of the study was to examine test bias and the "non-effects" of schooling. Teachers were given a list of words selected from standardized vocabulary tests and asked to indicate the words they had taught. The words were classified by the grade level at which they were first introduced. Ninety-five third-grade students in four schools…

Models proposed by Cleary, Thorndike, Cole, Linn, Einhorn and Bass, Darlington, and Gross and Su for analyzing bias in the use of tests in a selection strategy are surveyed. Several additional models are also introduced. The purpose is to describe, compare, contrast, and evaluate these models while extracting such useful ideas as may be found in…