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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 CWRU, 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."
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