The Responses of Mexican American Children to Cognitive Demands in a Testing Situation

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Abstract
The question of which measures to use in the evaluation of early childhood education programs has become highly controversial. Most program evaluators have relied largely, often exclusively, on one of the standard measures of intelligence such as the Stanford-Binet or WPPSI. The present study incorporated observational procedures into an IQ testing situation in an attempt to include behavioral indices as outcome measures of an educational intervention program, the Houston Parent-Child Development Center. The sample for this study consisted of 40 low-income Mexican American children, ages 4 and 5, equally divided into program and control groups. Data were analyzed using MANOVA and discriminant function analysis. The findings indicated that given the testing situation, program children exhibited significantly more work and verbal responses and fewer substitutive responses than the controls. Although group differences in IQs were also statistically significant, test taking behaviors differentiated groups more accurately.