The present study investigated the concepts of intelligence of two groups of Hong Kong Chinese university students. They differed in the secondary schools from which they graduated, one followed the Chinese system and the other the E n a s h system. These two groups were otherwise similar in age, academic achievement, and racial background. Subjects were asked to rate items selected from four popular intelligence tests in terms of their relevance to measuring intelligence and perceived difficulty. The relevance ratings were taken as reflections of the group's concept of intelligence. Factor analysis revealed two major factors and several minor factors underlying the relevance ratings of the two groups. The major ones were Non-verbal and Verbal reasoning skills, and the minor ones were Social, Numerical, and Retrieval skills. The Non-verbal reasoning skill was rated equally relevant by the two groups of subjects and was considered as the most relevant skill to measuring intelligence. The Verbal reasoning and Social skills were next, followed by the Numerical skill with the Retrieval slull being the least relevant. The Chinese-school group tended to rate the Verbal reasoning skill to be less relevant than did the Enghsh-school group. These findings were attributed to the mental effort involved in solving each type of task and to the differences in school instruction.Interest in the concept of intelligence has always occupied an important place in the psychological literature (e.g., see Fry 1984). Researchers have used people's expressed beliefs as data base and are concerned with 'what it is' rather than 'who has it' (Resnick 1976). The emphasis is evident in the contextual theory of Sternberg (1984) who
The cross-cultural generalizability of two Western intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the WAIS, in a non-Western culture was examined. Samples of 976 Australian and 1003 Chinese university and high school students participated in a rating task. Items from the two tests were given to students, and were rated on the two aspects of relevance and difficulty. On relevance ratings, the underlying three-factor structure of the Chinese sample accords very well with that of the Australian, suggesting a basic common structure for the concept of intelligence across cultures. The three factors were spatial-mechanical, verbal and memory. The results also showed that both cultures consider spatial-mechanical items most important and memory items least important. The two samples differed, however, in mean difficulty scores on the three dimensions. These differences were attributed to possible cultural differences in nurturing and providing opportunities to practice the different skills. It is concluded that the concept of intelligence is comparable between Australian and Chinese cultures, and that, for both cultures, the two tests are legitimate measures of the intelligence construct.
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