[Source: Science Daily]

Some assessment tools which measure children’s thinking skills may have provided inaccurate information about poor, urban students because they are modelled on wealthier, mostly White, populations. A study of 500 children from high-poverty, urban communities in the United States found that one of the standard assessments for measuring children’s ‘executive functions’ did not accurately evaluate these students. Executive functions are a set of key thinking skills like working memory and self-control and existing research suggests that children from poorer backgrounds have less well-developed executive functions. The new study provides evidence that design flaws in the assessments themselves — which it has previously been suggested might exist — may have influenced this conclusion.

Read the Rest of this Article on Science Daily