Effects of mediated learning experience on Raven's matrices scores of African and non-African university students in South Africa

Rushton and Skuy [Intelligence 28 (2000) 1.] found that White university psychology students in South Africa averaged between one and two standard deviations higher than African students on Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. This new study was carried out to determine whether Feuerstein's Mediated Learning Experience would improve the scores of the African students. The sample comprised 70 African and 28 non-African first year psychology students. Subjects were given the Raven's on two occasions and, in-between, randomly constituted experimental groups were exposed to mediated learning experience. Both the African and non-African groups improved over the baseline on the Raven's compared to the control groups, with significantly greater improvement for the African group.