The Effect of Accented Speech on the Scoring of Ambiguous WISC-R Responses by Prejudiced and Nonprejudiced Raters

Though the issue of test bias has gained wide-spread publicity, the results of studies investigating the effects of the examiner's race on the scoring of responses from minority children remain equivocal. The present study was intended to investigate the effects of white examiners' prejudice levels on their scoring of ambiguous WISC-R responses from both white and Hispanic children. Participants, previously screened for prejudice level, were trained to score three sub-tests of the WISC-R. From these subtests, 55 ambiguous responses were recorded twice on audiotape in a mock assessment; in one condition, the responses were made by a Caucasian voice, in the other, by a Hispanic voice. The results showed that white “examiners” do not score Hispanic and white children's responses differently. This demonstrates, for the first time, that examiner prejudice levels in combination with examinee racial background account for little, if any, of the variance of scores obtained with the WISC-R.