Cross-Cultural Assessment

Cultural Loading and Linguistic Demands of Ability Tests

Intelligence and cognitive ability tests have long been criticized as unfair, inappropriate, and invalid for the purpose of assessing individuals who are culturally different. In general, they have been attacked as being culturally biased. In general, cultural bias has been defined historically as being psychometrically based. Such bias, therefore, has been sought with regard to item content, test sequence or difficulty, factor structure, prediction, and indices of reliability. For example, bias in item content might exist if tests that require knowledge of U.S. mainstream culture place culturally different individuals at a disadvantage because they have not been raised in the majority culture. Essentially, any aspect of the test that results in systematic differences in performance between one group and another, except for the actual ability being measured, could be construed as evidence of bias. Yet, when defined from the psychometric perspective, very few tests have ever shown evidence of bias. The reason may be that cultural differences in and of themselves simply do not alter the basic psychometric properties of a test, particularly not those related to reliability. However, the same cannot be said with respect to issues of validity.

Well-developed, modern tests of intelligence and cognitive ability may well be free of the types of psychometric-based cultural bias defined above; however, it cannot be disputed that such tests remain invariably loaded with cultural content and also require some type of linguistic or communicative ability. That is, all tests are a reflection of the very culture that gave rise to them and, by definition, will sample to varying degrees the knowledge and familiarity of that same culture possessed by any given individual. Test developers have long sought culture-free or culture-fair tests that eliminate cultural bias, but even tests that purportedly meet this goal contain elements with which individuals from some cultures would likely not be familiar (e.g., blocks and puzzles). Likewise, even so-called “nonverbal” tests require some form of linguistic or meta-linguistic communication and comprehension by the individual taking the test, albeit it may not require oral or spoken language. These factors are undeniably and inextricably linked to tests of ability developed in any country, and such tests are, therefore, inherently culturally loaded and linguistically demanding. If crosscultural testing is to achieve a greater degree of fairness, it must come in the form of understanding the manner in which cultural loading, not cultural bias, affects test performance.

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