Create a 5 pages page paper that discusses issues and controversies in psychology.
Create a 5 pages page paper that discusses issues and controversies in psychology. For example, the case of examiner bias in Scholastic Aptitude Tests in American schools is widely documented now, putting at disadvantaged students from ethnic minorities like African and Hispanic Americans. (Gould, 1996) The rest of this essay will elaborate on these points which question the value, consistency, and comprehensiveness of conventional intelligence tests and identifies scope for their improvement.
Ever since Alfred Binet and Theophile Simon created the first intelligence test in France in 1905, such tests have attracted controversy. Devised to identify possible mental deficiencies in French public school students, these tests were translated in English and adapted to public schools in England and the United States by 1910. Henry Goddard who promoted it in the United States administered it to a batch of 2000 White school children and came to the conclusion that “a child cannot learn the things that are beyond his grade of intelligence”. (Franklin, 2007, p.216)Later, he created a range of scores for normal White children and started to compare across such divisions as “rural versus urban, native-born versus foreign-born, and others.” (Franklin, 2007, p.216) Later when Howard Odum applied the Binet Intelligence Test to black children, he concluded that there were clear disparities between White and Black children if all facets, including “environment (home conditions), school conditions and progress, and in mental and physical manifestations” (Franklin, 2007, p.217). Being an influential sociologist of the time, the observations of Goddard and Odum were taken seriously in government policy circles. The result was the institution of segregation, whereby black pupils were confined to exclusive public schools with a special curriculum that focussed on teaching them vocational/practical skills. .
