Views on the Evaluation and School Orientation of Swiss, Spanish, and Portuguese children: Research Conducted in Kindergarten and Primary School Classes in Geneva and Bienne.
Authors: Kipfer Nadine , Groothius Patricia 
Published: July 2011

In Switzerland, as in other European countries, the percentage of foreign children is constantly rising. However, the omnipresent multiculturalism in primary school disappears in later years when school demands increase. This tendency is observed in the United States as well as in many European countries. It has caused researchers to point out several problems and to criticize the use of intelligence tests for selection and prediction of school results of minority children. It is argued that it is important to create alternative tests that do not discriminate against children from other cultures. One such alternative is a learning potential test. The main question researched with such tests is whether a child is able to profit from instruction/training and to what extent (Hessels & Kipfer, 2003). In fact, these tests do not measure a product of previous learning, as do intelligence tests, but instead focus on the process of learning.

The Master’s thesis was focused on two aspects. The first was to translate and test the applicability of the Learning Potential Test for Children from Ethnic Minories (LEM), created in the Netherlands for the assessment of Turkish and Moroccan children (Hamers, Hessels, & Van Luit, 1991; Hessels, 1993), in the Swiss-French context. The second research aspect concerned interviews with teachers and school psychologists to understand what materials they use for children from ethnic minorities and what are their expectations with regard to school success.

The LEM is composed of six sub-tests that take into consideration two main factors: inductive reasoning (classification, series of numbers, and figurative analogies) and verbal learning (word-object association, recognition and denomination, and syllable recall). A classic test, Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) was also administered to observe the differences between a static and a dynamic measure. We assessed Swiss, Portuguese, and Spanish children, because Portuguese and Spanish represent two large minority cultures in Geneva and Bienne. The children were divided in two groups: one with children aged between 5;4 to 6;9 years and the second with children aged 6;10 to 7;9 years.

The test first of all proved also to be a reliable test in the present context. Cronbach’s alpha varied between .91 and .94. However, the main hypothesis, that the difference in mean scores between the various groups would be smaller with the LEM than with the SPM, was not confirmed. In fact, Swiss children scored 1.3 to 4.7 points higher on the subtests of the LEM (standard scores) than the Portuguese and Spanish children, and the Spanish children showed a higher performance than the Portuguese children. The Swiss children, as expected, outperformed the Portuguese and Spanish children on the SPM. A comparison of the results of the Spanish and Portuguese children on the LEM and the SPM showed that relative performance on both tests did not change. The fact that Spanish children showed a higher mean performance than the Portuguese children was explained by the onset of migration: the Spanish workers came to Switzerland in the early 1960’s, whereas the Portuguese arrived only during the 80’s, which makes a difference of at least one generation that was born and raised in Switzerland. The fact that the differences on the LEM and SPM were smaller and did not change much from one test to the other was explained by the fact that the cultural and language differences were much smaller than in the Dutch research (Hessels & Hessels-Schlatter, 2002). In fact, all languages in the present research have the same Latin-Romanic roots.

The second aspect of the research concerned interviews with 9 teachers and 3 school psychologists. It was expected that teachers and school psychologists would not have the same expectations for the three different groups of children, and we tried to shed some light on which factors influenced the supposed underestimation of minority children by teachers and school psychologists. Both teachers and psychologists asserted that their expectations of ethnic minority children and Swiss were not different. They claimed to differentiate only according to the school difficulties that a particular child would display. To assess and orient the child, the school psychologist said to not only use measures of IQ, but also others tests like the Draw-a-man test or others measure to have a complete evaluation. According to them, factors that could influence assessment were culture, mother tongue, emotions displayed during the test, or the criteria of evaluation.

A salient detail in this study was that teachers’ ratings of children’s school results, behavior, and application in class was generally lower for minority children than for Swiss children, especially in special education classes where large differences were found.