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Cross‐cultural cognition: Developing tests for developing countries
Author(s) -
Baddeley Alan,
Gardner Julie Meeks,
GranthamMcGregor Sally
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.2350090711
Subject(s) - psychology , cognition , reading comprehension , cognitive psychology , comprehension , vocabulary , test (biology) , literacy , cognitive test , spelling , reading (process) , developmental psychology , computer science , linguistics , programming language , paleontology , pedagogy , philosophy , neuroscience , biology
The problems of adapting measures of cognitive performance to Third World conditions are described, and three novel adaptations are proposed, one based on speed of sentence comprehension, one on vocabulary acquisition, and a third on speed of visual search using pictorial material. These and other existing tests are applied to studying the cognitive performance of Jamaican children as part of an investigation into the effects on cognition of infection by the parasitic worm Trichuris trichiura . We demonstrate that the tests are usable under Third World field conditions, and give reliable results. The validity of our proposed tests is indicated by their capacity to predict scholastic performance. Despite their brevity and avoidance of any demand on literacy, they yielded substantial correlations with the reading, spelling and arithmetic scales of the Wide Range Achievement Test.