Mental differences in certain immigrant groups : psychological tests of south Europeans in typical California schools with bearing on the educational policy and on the problems of racial contacts in this country / by Kimball Young.
- Kimball Young
- Date:
- [1922]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Mental differences in certain immigrant groups : psychological tests of south Europeans in typical California schools with bearing on the educational policy and on the problems of racial contacts in this country / by Kimball Young. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![as are mental measurements, it is much more so than random subjective impression that this pupil is thus, and that one so. The significant matter for the present purpose is the apparent close relation of these estimates to grade location, and the all- around superiority of the American children in the minds of the teachers. While taking into account the likelihood of considerable error in teachers’ ratings, the indubitable fact remains that these ratings do show wide differences in the abilities of the groups in question. in. Teachers’ Estimates of School Work. The ratings on qual ity of school work were on the same seven-fold scale as the estimates of intelligence. In this case, the teacher was requested to compare the child to be rated with the average child in his grade. Table XXI shows the facts concerning the percentage of each racial group falling in the scale. Again the Americans are much more variable than the Latin groups, but in the case of the C. T. the groups are mueh farther apart than they are in estimates of intel ligence. The mean difference of all the means of the groups for the school work is .94 of the range of one class-interval or class- rank in the scale. This is nearly one-seventh of total range. Table XX presents the mean differences in the C. T. of the estimates of school work for the several groups. As in the case of rating intelligence there persists a considerable divergence of the Latins from the Americans. It is also instructive that while 3 per cent of the American group averaged “Very Superior” in the rating of school success, none of the Latin group warranted the same. Yet one must be careful not to overlook the facts that may go to influence any teacher’s rating of a child (111, pp. 95, 97). Not only personal factors of appearance, impression and prepossession generally affect the ratings, but also the fact that what may constitute “aver age” in school work to one teacher may not be so to another. In the case of school work, as in rating intelligence, the over ageness of the immigrant children gives them an advantage with the teachers. The fact that they are retarded in the grades, sit ting perhaps a second time in a particular section, is ignored or forgotten when the comparison is with pupils much younger and attacking the school work for the first time. Even these facts do not prevent marked differences in the mean performance at each grade for the common age of 12 years. [26]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18026205_0029.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
