The long-term follow-up of severely malnourished children who participated in an intervention programme - abstract

Eighteen severely malnourished children (IM) who participated in a 3-year home-visiting programme of psycho-social stimulation were compared with two other non-intervened groups comprising 17 severely malnourished (NIM) and 19 adequately nourished children (controls). On enrolment, all groups were in the same hospital and both malnourished groups received equivalent medical care. Initially, both malnourished groups had similar developmental levels which were significantly lower than those of the controls. The IM group caught up to the controls during intervention then declined slightly. We report here the children's progress 6 to 14 years after leaving hospital. The NIM group showed no sign of reducing their deficits and at 14-year follow-up they had markedly lower scores on the WISC verbal and performance scales, the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), than the controls. Through-out the follow-up, the IM group's scores were intermediate between the NIM and controls in every test. At the 14-year follow-up, their scores were significantly higher than those of the NIM group in the WISC verbal scale, and the difference approached significance in the WRAT (p<0.1) (AU)

Intelligence tests of white and colored school children in Grand Cayman

In this study the commonly found black inferiority on intelligence tests ocurred only in tests for younger children which did not show the advance in age expected of a good test, and in the most academic tests for older children. On three out of five performance tests there were no significant color differences among juniors. The same dark-colored seniors who were inferior to whites in verbal classification, opposites and analogies, did well in all the non-language tests, including pictorial classification. The older colored pupils also did as well as the whites in the test involving number relationships and in the final reasoning test which called for certain symbolic operations such as characterize the thinking we call reasoning. It is significant that this last test did not employ very uncommon words and did deal with subject matter, such as family relationships and proverbs, with which colored pupils were probably as familiar as the more cultivated white pupils. The present study, then, does not lend support to the conclusion that colored inferiority in intelligence tests has a racial basis (Summary)