This report defines musical aptitude in order to construct a test and obtain data pertinent to the perfecting of the definition and helpful in the practical assessment of student aptitude. Criteria for assessing potential music students often reflect achievement rather than aptitude; objective tests are often too atomistic and narrow in scope or…

A review of the research reveals that standardized intelligence and achievement testing presents linguistic, cultural, and psychological difficulties for Spanish-speaking children in terms of such internal or intervening variables as the language of the administration of the test, the extent of the verbal factor in it, and the ethnic background of…

Internal evidence of cultural bias, in terms of various types of item analysis, was sought in the Wonderlic Personnel Test results in large, representative samples of whites and Negroes totalling some 1,500 subjects. Essentially, the lack of any appreciable Race X Items interaction and the high interracial similarity in rank order of item…

Over one thousand books and articles published between 1942 and 1973 are listed in this bibliography. These citations are concerned not only with discriminatory testing, interviewing and recruiting processes, but also with efforts on the part of employers to overcome these problems. Emphasis is placed on discrimination in the employment and…

Eight graduate students were used as experimenters in this study to assess the effects of experimentally induced experimenter outcome bias with respect to selected suprasegmental phenomena (pitch, stress, and terminal intonation) emitted by the experimenters during the instruction reading phase of a behavioral experiment. Experimenters were led to…

The lag that exists between traditional measures of masculinity and femininity in occupational interests and the changing role of women in the world of work is discussed. It is stated that most masculinity-femininity scales in use today measure the degree of conformity with socially and culturally determined sex roles. Scales discussed are the…

Concludes that these standardized tests of intelligence--the Peabody Picture Vocabulary, Raven's Progressive Matrices, Stanford-Binet, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Wonderlic Personnel Test, and most likely many other similar tests--show practically no evidence of differential culture bias for blacks and whites. (Author)

Because the controversy over the fairness of knowledge testing is fundamentally a confrontation between the politically dominant Anglo-oriented groups and rising minorities, issues concerning the use and interpretation of tests are more likely to be settled in the political arena than in the educational arena. (JD)

Reviewed are the technical problems in the work of Grill and Bartel who attempted to demonstrate that a bias exists in the Grammatical Closure subtest of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities against speakers of nonstandard English. (SBH)

A variety of practical applications of item characteristic curve test theory are discussed. Among these applications are tailored testing, two stage testing, determining whether two tests measure the same latent trait, and measuring item bias towards minority or other groups. (Author/JKS)

The authors of this article have devised an instrument called the "Conoley Southwest Indigenous Quotient Test: A Technique to Help Teachers Understand Why Many Mexican American Children Perform Poorly on Culturally Biased Intelligence Tests". (AM)

Critics of standardized tests support new legislation to provide breakdowns of test results by sex, race, and ethnic group, confident they will find evidence of bias. (MSE)

One method to correct for selection bias in comparing Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores among states is presented, which is a modification of J. J. Heckman's Selection Bias Correction (1976, 1979). Empirical results suggest that sample selection bias is present in SAT score regressions. (SLD)

Legal decisions from the past 20 years that have been influential on the direction of the competency-based and teacher certification testing movement are described. Suggestions for test developers are made to guide them in developing tests that are fair and that comply with legal precedents. (JL)

The performance of various ethnic groups on teacher competency tests in several states are reported. The data indicate that disproportionate numbers of minority candidates are being screened out of teaching. Implications for the national teaching force are examined. (Author/MT)