People’s intelligence is very sensitive issue, especially in relation with racial, national or intersexual differences. This paper focuses on the possibilities and limits of detection of various aspects of practical intelligence (as defined by Sternberg, 2002) of Roma children from socially and culturally disadvantaged environment in Slovakia. Roma children fail in traditional intelligence tests, and this is caused by many factors, such as insufficient pre-school preparation, retarded maturation process, lack of stimuli in home environment, language barrier, cultural and historical differences from majority population, and others. Therefore we abandon traditional way of detecting the intelligence of Roma children and try to find mean for identification of their true potential and practical intelligence, which would be better predictor of their future success in school and life.
This paper is part of project APVV-20-049105 “Practical intelligence of Slovak population of Roma children”, whose aim is to create and construct diagnostic tool for identification and enhancing the intellectual potential of Roma children by taking into consideration cultural dependence of practical and academic intelligence.
We would like to introduce the diagnostic tool RPSI (Roma Practical Skills Inventory). RPSI is an explicit inventory and it was preceded by implicit inventory RCACI (Roma Children Adaptive Competencies Inventory), which listed several adaptive competencies of Roma children, as they were reported by the Roma parents and teachers in interviews and focus groups.
Based on the results of statistical analyses of RCACI we created tasks for RPSI, which in its experimental form consisted of these subtests: Drawing a human figure (level of psychosocial development and fine motor skills), Reading test (reading comprehension, finding information from the written text, functional literacy), Money (practical mathematics), Time (planning abilities, abstract thinking) and Sweets (delaying of gratification, short-term planning). Collection of data for the project was realized in April 2008. Overall 124 children (81 Roma and 43 non-Roma) aged 7 – 13 years participated in the study.
Preliminary analyses showed that Drawing moderately predicted the overall intellectual abilities. Reading subtest correlated moderately with verbal abilities in standard test of cognitive skills and school grades and showed that Roma children did not mastered Slovak language sufficiently. Subtest Money relatively effectively detected the tacit knowledge, but further verification in different experimental settings is needed. Subtest Time did not work very well, mainly due to lack of understanding the Slovak language. Subtest sweets worked well, it was very well accepted by children, but due to its time-demanding nature we were not able to collect data for comparison, therefore we present only brief preliminary results in this paper.
In discussion the paper presents the perspective of educational implication of the RPSI. We conclude that RPSI is quite effective in determination of intellectual potential of Roma children and has some advantages in comparison with traditional academic tests. This diagnostic method is quite unique as it utilizes also practical and not only academic abilities of children from disadvantaged cultural environment, as the Roma children certainly are.