Evidence of Item Bias in the Verbal Subtests of the WISC-R for Mexican-American Children

Abstract

The study investigated cultural bias in the verbal items of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). Six verbal subtests of the WISC-R were administered to 40 Anglo and 40 Mexican-American subjects matched for grade level, sex, and socioeconomic status. The responses of two groups of subjects to individual items comprising verbal subtests were analyzed by log-linear technique using the likelihood ratio chi-square statistic. The findings revealed that the performance of subjects was homogeneous across two cultural groups on the items comprising Arithmetic, Comprehension, and Digit Span subtests. Ten (13%) of the 79 items comprising Information, Similarities, and Vocabulary subtests were, however, found to be biased against Mexican-American subjects. Three of these items are from the Information subtest, two from Similarities, and the remaining five items from Vocabulary. Implications of these findings for the psychoeducational assessment of minority children were discussed.