What's the difference?
As a teacher I've been particularly curious about the idea of having a biased test. I'm a bit of a numbers junkie, so I've analyzed the scores of basically every test I've ever given. Mostly I've broken things down by grade level and gender as I've yet to have a class with a sizable ethnic minority. In my physics class, males pretty much always outperform females on average on the exams. It made me wonder if there was something in my delivery of the material, in the wording of the questions, in some aspect of the classroom environment that would put females at a disadvantage.Last summer I went to national conference on physics education and saw that there were numerous research groups who were investigating what they termed the "gender gap" which was apparently ubiquitous throughout the physics world. It put me at ease knowing that my results were the same as everyone else's.
So what is going on here? I see three possibilities for any widespread results on a test that are discrepant between certain groups:
1. Genetic differences - one groups brain actually processes information differently
2. Support differences - one group has more support/encouragement
3. Differences in traditions - one group is more familiar with certain types of analogies/analysis
For a gender difference within the same ethnicity (white males consistently score higher in math, but lower in english on standardized tests), it could be that a certain gender is influenced by society to be more interested in certain subjects. Or it could be that their brains actually function differently (a rather touchy subject, but quite substantiated by neurology), and that difference somehow affects the performance of certain activities.
For a discrepancy between ethnic groups within the same country, differences in stable, supportive homes is a major factor. I think that differences in ethnic traditions can play a role as well, but how large a role is a tough question. I know a professor that taught physics to exiled Buddhist monks and told me about how he had to drastically change the analogies and wording he would normally use. Yet at the same time the logic (there's that word again) required to solve the problem was the same, it was just couched in a different setting.
The New Haven firefighter case is an interesting situation. Here we have adults, largely of the same gender, taking an exam in a field within which they all had experience. Would it be possible to write an exam that favored one group over another in such a situation? As adults, home support seems like less of an issue (not that that would be a bias in the exam, just a factor in the results). I know of no evidence for a difference in brain function between african americans and caucasian americans. So the only possibility I see is if the test somehow favored the ethnic traditions of one group. While I guess this is possible, it seems highly unlikely.
Comments
So one explanation (other than the 2 you propose--brain function and biased exam) is that under-qualified or less-qualified black applicants were given jobs early on in the system and only had a problem when they got to this test.
The other explanation is simply cultural (which could be the same as your "support") which is simply that blacks think its "acting white" or being an "oreo" to do well in school, and that discourages them from studying for tests.
You seem to dissmiss support because they are further along in their carriers, but I'm not sure why just because they'd made it that far in the profession, they necessarily shed this cultural barrier. (Maybe you are thinking of support in terms of parent-child support?)
While a person certainly does not shed his culture when he enters his 20s or 30s (I'm assuming most of these firefighters fall in that range), the parent-child relationship is likely modified and I would think that someone is less swayed by negative cultural peer pressures than they were in their teens (when much of the standardized testing discrepancy manifests itself).
It says something for single sex education. Maybe you should try having males and females take tests in separate rooms and see how the scores are affected? Other than that I think girls and minorities are stuck just waiting for stereotypes to go away until the don't influence them anymore.
-Theresa
Interesting point on the environmental influences on a test subject. I'm wondering if the effect is concentrated at the actual taking of the test or if it is more due to the overall classroom experience. I have a hard time believing that I could teach a coed class and drastically change my test results by simply separating boys and girls on the day of the test. Single sex education is an interesting option with a number of pros and cons, but I'm guessing that separating students along ethnic lines would not be a popular idea.