Use of the Tactual Performance Test for cognitive ability testing with African children.

Abstract

Researchers evaluated 195 rural Zairian children between 5 and 12 years of age with the Tactual Performance Test (TPT) used in the Reitan-Indiana Battery. For all of the TPT performance and memory measures, Zairian children with poorer anthropometric indicators of nutritional wellbeing were significantly below the age-matched groups of American and Canadian children. The Zairian children also did not demonstrate the typical improvements between the dominant and nondominant hand trials. Older Zairian children with such decrements tended to do more poorly on the Simultaneous Processing and Nonverbal ability portions of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. Although probably not appropriate for direct intercultural comparisons, the authors concluded that neuropsychological measures derived from tasks such as the TPT may still be useful in monitoring the longitudinal brain-behavior impact of various health interventions for enhancing intellectual development for African children. One of the most tragic and yet pervasive aspects of psychometric assessment worldwide is the intellectual deficits consistently noted with such testing in low socioeconomic strata of underdeveloped countries and in the more impoverished segments of the industrialized world (Alvarez, 1982; Alvarez, 1983). In explaining this phenomenon, researchers have emphasized the impact of poverty and psychosensory deprivation on the developmental milieu of the child. Such early developmental deprivation results in cognitive ability deficits that can best be ameliorated with specific social, educational, health, and nutritional interventions to enrich this milieu during critical periods of child development (e.g., McKay, Sinisterra, McKay, Gomez, & Lloreda, 1978). Another major approach suggests that the apparent cognitive deficits of the lower socioeconomic groups are more the result of industrial middle-class or Westernized testing of children whose skills actually are better evaluated by more ecologically or culturally appropriate techniques. Thus, the culture fairness of the assessments on which the phenomenon is based is called into question (Helms, 1992). An alternate