The relationship of intellectual ability and psychomotor skills to the academic achievement of bilingual students.

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between discrete areas of cognitive processing and academic achievement in minority children. There have been many questions about the fairness of current testing practices as they have been applied to students from differing ethnicities. These students are entitled by law to a meaningful, nonbiased assessment of their abilities. The minority children targeted for study were bilingual Hispanic students. Cognitive processing tasks were drawn from established measures of perceptual-motor development, auditory recall, and nonverbal intellectual ability. Academic achievement was measured by two comprehensive tests, one that was English-based and another that was Spanish-based. One hundred fifty-eight students enrolled in eleven third grade classrooms were examined. The subjects participated in group administrations of the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, and a bilingual version of the Digit Span subtest from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. The Spanish-based achievement test was La Prueba Riverside de Realizacion en Espanol. The English-based achievement test was the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Data were first analyzed by a stepwise multiple regression procedure to determine which of the experimental measures would predict academic achievement. Results indicated that the strongest predictor of academic achievement were scores from the test of nonverbal intellectual ability, which held true for both achievement tests. Scores in immediate auditory recall in English predicted achievement in certain achievement areas, but only on the Spanish-based test. Scores on the perceptual-motor test also predicted achievement on the Spanish-based test only. Auditory recall in Spanish did not predict achievement in any area on either test. The study concludes with a discussion of the viability of the independent measures as a meaningful, comprehensive test battery to be used with minority children in schools. Implications for future research and administrative planning are discussed.