Testing bias in psychology, law, and public policy, 1920-1980

Author / Creator

McNamara, Keith, author

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Online

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Summary

This dissertation traces the psychological, political, and legal debates that have surrounded testing bias, specifically the idea of "cultural bias" in psychometric testing. It explores the early c...

This dissertation traces the psychological, political, and legal debates that have surrounded testing bias, specifically the idea of "cultural bias" in psychometric testing. It explores the early critiques in the 1910s and 1920s through the emergence of federal legislation and court decisions in the late 1960s and 1970s. It argues that while test bias was a concern primarily within the professional literature until the 1970s, the preoccupation within the profession went much deeper than scholars have previously acknowledged. Test bias was a perennial concern from the beginnings of mental testing in the United States. The notion that tests might be invalid measures for certain socioeconomic, racial, linguistic, and cultural groups was a persistent threat to their legitimacy as objective scientific instruments. But how it threatened that legitimacy, and the efforts that psychologists and other social scientists devoted to the problem of testing bias, varied in scope, intensity, and emphasis throughout the twentieth century. As the nature of the attacks against ability testing shifted, so too did the degree to which the psychometric profession was able (or willing) to respond. The belief that a purely objective assessment of native ability was possible so long as cultural interferences could be effectively neutralized animated the development of nonverbal test batteries in the 1910s and 1920s and became the inspiration for many "culture free" and "culture fair" instruments in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. When the disappointing predictive validity of these instruments undermined their value compared to traditional scales, many psychologists conceded the idea of culture fair testing as chimerical. But postwar optimism and the invention of more flexible and differentiated test batteries renewed enthusiasm among many scholars in the power of social science to solve social problems, including testing bias. As tensions and criticisms mounted by the 1960s, however, psychologists once again found themselves defending their credibility against a multitude of popular testing critics, civil rights activists, and litigants prepared to bring their grievances to Congress and the federal courts. By the mid-1970s, a more constrained, technical definition of test bias was carved out to protect the scientific legitimacy of ability testing and the professional credibility of those committed to their use.

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