Sub‐cultural Differences on Selected Cognitive Tasks

Abstract

SUMMARY. The present study investigated some relationships between age, socio-economic status (SES), and cognitive task performance among 120 children from Grades 1 and 4. A battery of tasks differing in transformational requirements and ostensibly in cultural loading was administered to all children. Analyses of results indicate that low SES children were more handicapped in some tasks of so-called reasoning ability when compared to middle SES children. But contrary to expectations, the test scores of the contrasted SES groups were more disparate in Grade 1 than in Grade 4. For the older age group, SES differences on the culturally loaded Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) were apparent, whereas differences on the culturallyreduced Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices were statistically non-significant. INTRODUCTIONIn a recent review of 50 years of intelligence testing, Vernon (1979) concluded a section

Two Factors are too Simplistic: A Response to Birnbrauer (1985)

“…He mentions that classifying does not help the therapist in treatment selection and warns that it may be misleading because, ' 'different classes suggest different causes, functions and methods of treatment'' (p.3). This statement is an inadvertent endorsement of the model since the framework is intended to facilitate the possibility of identifying and specifying different causes, functions and treatments, namely, person x treatment interactions (see Eysenck, 1979;Das & Molloy, 1975;Denkowski et al, 1984;MacKenzie and Molloy, 1980;Molloy, 1981;Molloy, 1985;Molloy, in press;Das, 1980a, Molloy andDas, 1980b;Pelham & Murphy, in press). In other words, the framework takes into account the probability of maximizing treatment effectiveness by considering the efficacy of different strokes (treatments) for different folks.…”