The Meaning and Stability of Raven's Matrices Test Among Africans

Abstract

L'étude porte sur les facteurs qui conditionnent la réussite des sujets africains à des tests d'aptitude, les Matrices de Raven en particulier. Une étude récente menée au Nigeria, montre qu'une seconde passation des Matrices, six mois après la première, améliore les réponses; ees résultats sont comparés à ceux de nouvelles recherches entreprises dans L'Est Africain. L'A. propose une théorie psychosociale qui permettrait de prédire quels sont les sujets qui réussiraient le mieux dans ces épreuves. Il constate que L'utilisation de moyens audiovisuels pour transmettre les items et les consignes joue un rôle important. On peut voir d'après les résultats que les sujets qui avaient des notes basses aux Matrices sont ceux qui s'améliorent le plus au cours d'une seconde passation; d'autre part, bien que les notes aux Matrices corrèlent fortcment avec les notes à L'?preuve EFT (Embedded Figures Test), on peut remarquer que ce sont les sujets qui avaient les notes les plus fortes à L'EFT, dont les réponses aux Matrices s'améliorent avec une seconde passation. Les recherches futures en Afrique doivent tenir compre de la structure des épreuves aussi bien que de I'influence du chercheur sur ceux qui subissent les tests, afin de sauvegarder les programmes d'études à venir.

Raven's test performance of sub-Saharan Africans: Average performance, psychometric properties, and the Flynn Effect

“…Whenever tests were administered twice, we used the pretest scores. Although the potential unfamiliarity of some African test-takers with cognitive testing may render their scores on a retest more valid (Laroche, 1959;Wober, 1969), retest effects make it difficult to compare the mean results from retests to western norms that were based on a single test administration. We did not assign IQ values to studies in which the SPM or CPM did not meet basic psychometric standards, as will be discussed in the results section.…”

“…Lynn (and Vanhanen) compared their CPM scores to British norms 2 and calculated an average IQ of about 69 (Lynn, 2006;Lynn & Vanhanen, 2002). In another study conducted in Nigeria, Wober (1969) administered the SPM twice to a group of male factory workers. Lynn (and Vanhanen) compared their pretest scores to British norms, and concluded that their average IQ was below 65.…”

A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans

“…Our own searches in library databases resulted in additional relevant studies that may be used to estimate national IQ. For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975;Ferron, 1965;Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a,b;Nenty & Dinero, 1981;Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices.…”

The challenge of cross-cultural assessment—The Test of Ability To Explain for Zulu-speaking Children

“…Factors related to the tester include attitude (Bracken & Barona, 1991), race (Labov, 1977) and training (Wober, 1969).…”

“…It has been demonstrated that the limited output of culturally different or non-mainstream children, which had given support to the early deviance theory of Bernstein (1970), was partly as a result of the factor of the race of the tester. Having a tester of the same race has been found to be more significant for achieving better results, than the method used to administer an individual or group test (Wober, 1969).…”