System of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment

The System of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment, best known as SOMPA, was developed by S. Mercer and A. Lewis in 1978 to meet the educational and mental health needs of minority children. Published by the Psychological Corporation, the SOMPA was discontinued in 2003. The SOMPA was designed as a system for assessing the level at which children function in cognitive abilities, perceptual motor abilities, and adaptive behavior in a nondiscriminatory manner.

Intended to provide a comprehensive assessment of children ages 5 to 11, the SOMPA included a medical component, a social component, and a pluralistic component. The medical component determined the presence or absence of organic pathology. Six measures were used to assess the medical component: physical dexterity tasks (sensory motor coordination), the Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test (perceptual and neurological factors), the Health History Inventories, weight by height norms (nutritional or developmental problems), vision (the Snellen Test), and auditory acuity (national norms).

The social component was concerned with a child's ability to adapt and function in social situations. Two measures were used to assess the social component: the Adaptive Behavior Inventory for Children and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R).

Last, the pluralistic perspective yielded an index of a child's intelligence or Estimated Learning Potential through a “corrected” WISC-R score based on a comparison of how well the child performed on that test with the performance of other children who had had similar learning opportunities.

The procedures of the SOMPA provided an alternative testing method to increase the proportion of minority students in gifted education programs, particularly in states that used IQ cut-off scores for placement decisions. There was some evidence to suggest that IQ or Estimated Learning Potential, as measured by the SOMPA, was able to predict school achievement. In addition, the SOMPA had some utility as an aide to psychological assessment of Native American Navajo children. In spite of the general acceptance of the SOMPA as a tool for assessing children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, some criticism remained unresolved. One was the claim that the SOMPA was a better instrument than the WISC for predicting learning potential in a school environment. Also, concerns were raised regarding the national representativeness of the sample. Despite the criticism, the SOMPA represented the first attempt at reducing cultural biases and stigmatization in assessing culturally and linguistically diverse children.