The Shrinking Gap

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/ps/

"Is there evidence that the racial gap may be environmental?" I ask this about intelligence score differences. New evidence that the difference may indeed be environmental is reported in the March, 1998, Psychological Science. A research team led by Washington University psychologist Joel Myerson mined data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (which has followed nearly 13,000 people first studied as adolescents in 1979). For this study, they examined the aptitude scores of whites and of African Americans who had graduated from college as of 1989. As part of the youth survey, each had taken the Armed Forces Qualification Test, an aptitude inventory that correlates highly with other general cognitive ability tests.

From 8th grade through the early high school years, the average aptitude score of the white college-grads-to-be increased while African Americans' scores decreased, creating a growing racial gap that peaked about the time that high school students take college admissions tests. During college, the scores of the black graduates-to-be increased "more than four times as much" as those of their white counterparts, thus greatly decreasing the racial aptitude gap.

"It is not surprising," conclude Myerson and his colleagues, "that as black and white students complete more grades in high school environments that differ in quality, the gap in cognitive test scores widens. At the college level, however, where black and white students are exposed to educational environments of comparable quality (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995), many blacks are able to make remarkable gains, closing the gap in test scores."