Sex differences and sex bias on the Boehm test of basic concepts: Do they exist?

Abstract

Form A of the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC) was administered to 180 kindergartners-90 boys and 90 girls. Neither their mean scores nor their standard deviations differed significantly, and the distributions of scores for the two groups were virtually identical. Moreover, the application of three internal criteria for bias yielded totally negative results; thus, there was no evidence of either sex differences or sex bias in the data.In a recent study (Silverstein, Belger, & Morita, 1982), we addressed the question of whether social class differences on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC) (Boehm, 197 1) are due to bias. The norms show that mean scores consistently increase (and standard deviations decrease) as one proceeds from low to high socioeconomic level, and that these differences are of considerable size. Yet, when we analyzed the standardization data, the rank orders of item difficulties proved to be as similar for children of different socioeconomic levels as they were for children of the same socioeconomic level; thus, by this one criterion, there was little evidence of test bias.In the present study, our attention shifted from social class to sex. More specifically, we set out to investigate sex differences and the possibility of sex bias on the BTBC. Our interest in these issues was prompted by the fact that neither the test manual nor any of the publications we have seen that deal with the test reports a comparison of the performance of boys and girls.The subjects for the study were 180 kindergartners (90 boys and 90 girls) from a single Southern California school district, all of whom had taken Form A of the BTBC at the start of the school year. Concern over confidentiality precluded our obtaining any information about these children other than their sex, but various results reported below (means, standard deviations, and internal consistency reliabilities) suggest that they were quite comparable to the kindergartners who provided a portion of the standardization data for the BTBC.The mean scores were 34.44 (SD=8.00) for boys and 34.98 (SD=7.93) for girls. As is apparent, neither the means nor standard deviations differed significantly. Moreover, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test failed to reject the hypothesis that the distributions of scores for the two groups were identical. So much for sex differences! However, just as the presence of group differences does not necessarily imply bias, the absence of such differences does not rule out the possibility that bias exists. Accordingly, we applied three internal criteria for bias to the data, the basic notion being that if boys and girls differ markedly with respect to any of a number of psychometric properties of the test, one may suspect that it is biased toward one sex or the other.The internal consistency reliabilities, calculated by Kuder-Richardson formula 20, were .89 for boys and .88 for girls; the corresponding standard errors of measurement were 2.69 for both groups. Again, as is apparent, the reliabilities did not differ

Comprensión de lectura en alumnos de cuarto y quinto grados de primaria de Lima

“…Sin embargo, estos resultados no coinciden con los de Stanley y Benbow (Moir y Jessel, 1991) o los de Lerner (1993), quienes sostuvieron que las niñas muestran mayor capacidad verbal en los primeros años del colegio y que existe mayor probabilidad de que los varones tengan problemas de lectura. Asimismo, tampoco se asemeja a lo que obtuvieron Silverstein et al (1983), quienes evaluaron con el BTBC a niños de Kindergarten, y no encontraron diferencias significativas según género.…”