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For Israeli eighth-grade students of Asian-African origin, achievement decreases as a function of birth order in small families and increases as a function of birth order in large families. This finding cannot be accounted for by differences in developmental rate or size of birth intervals. It can be accounted for by considering the effect of external influences, such as schooling, on intellectual development.

The nonverbal reasoning performance of Israeli advantaged and disadvantaged (N = 952) children was measured in grades 2, 4, and 6. Measurement followed the "Learning Potential" (LP) paradigm, with its three stages: pretesting, coaching in relevant problem-solving strategies, and posttesting. All results were presented in raw scores, in an attempt to assess absolute performance levels, and to present differences in terms of time gaps. The results show that all groups benefited substantially from training, but the improvement following training tended to decrease in the higher grades. In all grade levels, the disadvantaged children benefited from the coaching more than the advantaged children. The performance time gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children was about two years, with a tendency to grow with increasing age. The contribution of the coaching session in terms of absolute performance was equivalent to about two years. Posttest distributions of raw scores revealed a growing tendency toward unimodality and decreased proportions of false negatives. A. INTRODUCTIONThe results of IQ tests administered to different populations are customarily reported in relative terms, assessing the magnitude of the differences in standard scores (i.e., gap in IQ points). Such evaluations reflect the relative positions of the subpopulations compared, but they do not show the differences between the populations in actual level of perfor-Received in the Editorial Office, Provincetown, Massachusetts, on March 30, 1977, and given special consideration in accordance with our policy for cross-cultural research. Copyright, 1977, by The Journal Press. I Authors names appear in alphabetical order. 169 Downloaded by [Indiana University Libraries] at 13:58 04 February 2015 170 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGYmance. Seemingly uniform relative gaps do not necessarily reflect uniform differences in absolute performance levels. Summarizing American findings on ability testing in time differences, Jencks (7) claims that at age 6 the gap between an average white child and an average black child is one year. At age 12 the black child performs at a level reached by lO-year-old white children, and the gap grows up to 3 years at age 18. This kind of analysis is possible only when carried out on raw scores, which reflect actual (or absolute) levels of performance. Thus one can compare performance levels of disadvantaged children at a given age to the equivalent levels attained by younger "advantaged" children, thereby determining "mental equivalence" without needing any transformation of the distributions.In this study we used a nonverbal reasoning test appropriate for a relatively wide age range, and administered that test to advantaged and disadvantaged children in grades 2, 4, and 6. This design made it possible both to compare the absolute performance levels between the subpopulations within each grade level, and to compare the absolute performance levels between grades, within and between the subpopulations. Most importantly, using this des...

A special curriculum was designed for teaching cryptarithmetic to investigate whether disadvantaged students can reach a level of competence in mathematical thinking and whether the gap between them and advantaged students can be narrowed. In this program, the students learned to apply relevant problem-solving strategies and simple mathematical rules and to test hypotheses systematically. The findings indicated that a careful application of certain learning principles to the training of disadvantaged students resulted in an appreciably narrowed gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. The relationships between the cryptarithmetic performance and several tests of mental ability and achievement in mathematics were presented and discussed.

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