Comparative studies of full and mixed blood North Dakota IndiansPosted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-10-27 02:02Z by Steven |
Comparative studies of full and mixed blood North Dakota Indians
Psychological Monographs
Volume 50, Number 5 (1938)
pages 116-129
DOI: 10.1037/h0093522
C. W. Telford
The early comparative studies of Indian-white mixtures in America uniformly reported superior mental test performances of mixed as compared with full blood Indians. The tests used in these investigations were principally standard group intelligence tests of the language type, which reflect very markedly the different social, cultural, and educational backgrounds of the subjects. In this investigation the Peterson Rational Learning Test was used, an ideational learning test which seems to draw little on past experience and training, and which stimulates the subjects to approximately maximal effort throughout the performance. The subjects of the present study were students of the various Indian schools of North Dakota and of one school on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Eastern Montana. The degrees of Indian blood represented by the subjects were obtained from the government records. Positive values indicate that the mixed bloods excel while negative values show full blood superiority. Unless a minus sign appears before a figure, the value will be assumed to be positive. In other words, as the tests become more and more of the informational and achievement nature, the differences increasingly favor the mixed blood; or, conversely, as the tests depend more and more on basic learning and manipulative abilities, the differences between the two groups tend to disappear.
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