For immediate release: September 13, 2002.
For more information, contact Susan Griffith, 216-368-1004 or sbg4@po.cwru.edu

CLEVELAND—From about the age of three, whites on average outscore their African-American counterparts on IQ tests, but psychologists find the 15-point gap can be eliminated when each racial group has an equal opportunity to learn.

Joseph Fagan, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, and Cynthia Holland, associate professor of psychology from Cuyahoga Community College, showed that equal access to knowledge can boost IQ scores. They reported their findings in the study, "Equal Opportunity and Racial Differences in IQ" in the psychology journal Intelligence (2002, 30, pg. 361-387.)

Intelligence tests measure how much more one person knows about certain information than another. The researchers focused on the students' understanding of the meanings of words, which is one measure of intelligence and requires the use of what is known as the general factor in intelligence.

They conducted five experiments, testing the knowledge students have about archaic and obscure words from the dictionary and others from standard IQ tests. Fagan and Holland's experiments involved groups of students from a community college, with average ages between 25-27 years old. The number of students participating in the experiments ranged from 36 to 157 in each studied group.

Each experiment varied in the amount of training the students received on the definitions in order to test the researchers' hypothesis that equal opportunities to learn can level IQ scores. A long-time debate between psychologists centers on whether genetics or environment cause differences in IQ. Different cultural groups have different life experiences, which can also influence IQ scores.

"The data supports the view that cultural differences in the provision of information may account for racial difference in IQ," the researchers write.

"To understand why people differed in IQ, we feel that we must study the contributions that both intellectual ability and access to information make to knowledge," said Fagan. "We have seen repeatedly in the present series of experiments, when blacks and whites are given equal opportunity to acquire the meaning of words, the blacks' and whites' knowledge of the meaning of the these words does not differ."

–CWRU–

 

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