Patterns of intellectual ability of Arab school children in Israel

Standardization of an Arabic-Language Neuropsychological Battery for Epilepsy Surgical Evaluations

OBJECTIVES

This study provides a standardized Arabic language neuropsychological test battery and tests its ability to distinguish patients with left and right hemisphere epileptic foci who are candidates for surgical resection.

METHODS

An Arabic language battery of 15 tests was developed based on the neuropsychological test battery used at the Johns Hopkins Hospital for surgical evaluation of patients undergoing temporal lobe resection. With modifications where culturally required, 11 tests were translated to Arabic by the principal investigator and back-translated by two bilingual health professionals; four tests were available in Arabic and added to the battery. The battery was administered to 21 Arabic-speaking patients with left temporal epileptic foci, 21 with right temporal epileptic foci, and 46 neurologically and psychiatrically healthy adults.

RESULTS

Nearly all the Arabic test versions were capable of differentiating healthy controls and the temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) groups. Tests known to distinguish left and right temporal lobectomy candidates, such as wordlist memory and prose recall, were able to do so as accurately as the English versions. Also, a roughly "culturally free" task (the Baltimore Board) and a newly developed version of the Boston Naming Test demonstrated some sensitivity to left temporal lobe involvement.

CONCLUSIONS

Arabic-language neuropsychological tests for epilepsy surgical evaluations are made available, demonstrate cultural sensitivity and clinical validity, and require further psychometric property and normative research. (JINS, 2019, 25, 761-771).

Perceptions of Ethnic Group Modal Intelligence

This study examined Israeli college students' perceptions of the modal intelligence of five major Israeli ethnic groups, i.e., European Jews, Eastern Jews, Christian Arabs, Moslem Arabs, and Druze, and explored students' attributions with respect to the determinants of ethnic group differences in ability. In addition, this study explored their perceptions of the social distance of each of these five target groups and the relationship between a group's modal intelligence and perceived social distance. The quota sample consisted of 120 undergraduate students enrolled in a major northern Israeli campus and included representatives of each of the five target groups assessed. The perceived modal intelligence profiles for the five Israeli ethnic groups varied as a function of the student's ethnic group membership. Whereas, there was considerable disagreement with respect to the least intelligent and intermediate subgroups, there appears to be general consensus among Israeli students that Jews of Western extraction are the most intelligent of the major Israeli ethnic subgroups. Furthermore, Arab students, relative to their Jewish counterparts, were more prone to espouse an environmental stance in the explanation of group differences in ability. The relationship between a group's perceived modal intelligence and perceived social distance was tenuous. The data suggest that perceptions of intelligence are moulded by the role which each group plays in relation to the other and that students' perceptions of group modal intelligence function much like cultural group stereotypes. The data were discussed and explicated in terms of ethnic stereotypes and intergroup relationships.