In Search of a “Culturally Fair” Test: Allison Davis’ Challenge to Psychological Testing in the mid-Twentieth Century

Keith McNamara, University of Wisconsin-Madison

From the beginning of mass intelligence testing during World War I, controversies over the use and interpretation of standardized tests have preoccupied psychologists, educators, courts, policymakers, and the broader public. Since then, growing demand and support for tests in government, industry, and especially schools has significantly expanded their adoption and influence in both public and private institutions. Throughout their controversial history in the United States, the issue of testing bias, particularly cultural bias toward various minority groups, has been a central feature in many of these debates. This essay critically examines one of the most important yet overlooked episodes in the history of these debates - the first systematic investigation of cultural bias in psychological tests by Allison Davis and his team at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. Their work led to one of the most ambitious studies of social class influences on test scores, as well as one of the first “culturally fair” tests designed to account for social class differences – the Davis-Eells Games Test. Most scholars have interpreted these contributions as novel, though largely unsuccessful, attempts to identify hidden talent among minority and lower class students. But few have carefully investigated the varied motivations of the Chicago group, their challenges in constructing, validating, and marketing the new test, and how their efforts constituted a radical departure from and challenge to existing assumptions about ability testing by psychologists, psychometricians, and educators. Through an examination of archival and published sources, this essay challenges interpretations of their work as “merely a curio in the history of psychometrics.” It argues that it represented a culmination of decades of research on the influence of environmental factors on test scores that would have profound consequences for the future legality and public perception of psychological tests in the ensuing decades.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 254. Questioning Gifts, Challenging Talent