Manly Jennifer J, Jacobs Diane M, Touradji Pegah, Small Scott A, Stern Yaakov
Cognitive Neuroscience Division, Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, USA.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2002 Mar;8(3):341-8. doi: 10.1017/s1355617702813157.
The current study sought to determine if discrepancies in quality of education could explain differences in cognitive test scores between African American and White elders matched on years of education. A comprehensive neuropsychological battery was administered to a sample of African American and non-Hispanic White participants in an epidemiological study of normal aging and dementia in the Northern Manhattan community. All participants were diagnosed as nondemented by a neurologist, and had no history of Parkinson's disease, stroke, mental illness, or head injury. The Reading Recognition subtest from the Wide Range Achievement Test-Version 3 was used as an estimate of quality of education. A MANOVA revealed that African American elders obtained significantly lower scores than Whites on measures of word list learning and memory, figure memory, abstract reasoning, fluency, and visuospatial skill even though the groups were matched on years of education. However, after adjusting the scores for WRAT-3 reading score, the overall effect of race was greatly reduced and racial differences on all tests (except category fluency and a drawing measure) became nonsignificant. These findings suggest that years of education is an inadequate measure of the educational experience among multicultural elders, and that adjusting for quality of education may improve the specificity of certain neuropsychological measures.
本研究旨在确定教育质量的差异是否能够解释在受教育年限相同的非裔美国老年人和白人老年人之间认知测试分数的差异。在一项针对北曼哈顿社区正常衰老和痴呆的流行病学研究中，对非裔美国人和非西班牙裔白人参与者的样本进行了全面的神经心理测试。所有参与者均被神经科医生诊断为无痴呆症，且无帕金森病、中风、精神疾病或头部受伤史。使用《广泛成就测验第三版》中的阅读识别子测验来评估教育质量。一项多变量方差分析显示，尽管两组在受教育年限上相匹配，但在单词列表学习与记忆、图形记忆、抽象推理、流畅性和视觉空间技能测试中，非裔美国老年人的得分显著低于白人。然而，在对WRAT - 3阅读分数进行分数调整后，种族的总体影响大幅降低，并且所有测试（类别流畅性和一项绘画测试除外）中的种族差异变得不显著。这些发现表明，受教育年限不足以衡量多元文化老年人的教育经历，并且对教育质量进行调整可能会提高某些神经心理测试的特异性。
