Cross-Cultural Assessment

As the population of the United States becomes more diverse, the need for school psychologists to be competent in assessing individuals from cultures other than the U.S. mainstream has progressively intensified. Assessment is a broad term encompassing many different kinds of procedures and techniques. Cross-cultural testing is the use of standardized tests of intelligence and cognitive abilities with individuals who are culturally different and often linguistically different as well.

The term culture, as Matsumoto (1994) defines it, refers to the collection of values, attitudes, traditions, behaviors, and language that are specific to a particular group of individuals who purposely transmit those characteristics from one generation to the next. Therefore, the term culturally different can refer not only to those individuals who come from a culture other ...