Intelligence tests of white and colored school children in Grand Cayman

ABSTRACT

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)