Forging an Environmental Supports Bank for Vocabulary and Verbal Reasoning Testing in Zimbabwe

Josephine Jordan
Additional contact information
Josephine Jordan: University of Zimbabwe, Harare

Psychology and Developing Societies, 1989, vol. 1, issue 2, 165-175

Abstract: This paper describes the construction and validation of a bank of environmental supports for vocabulary and verbal reasoning tests in English in Zimbabwe. The bank exploits advances in corpus linguistics to provide systematic information on word usage in Zimba bwean school textbooks. Correlations with ranked item difficulties of existing texts confirmed the validity of the bank for vocabulary tasks, which was higher for a sample from less privileged schools. The bank showed less capacity to support the verbal reasoning task. At this juncture it is not possible to discern whether the fault lies with limitations of the bank or with the artificiality of the task.

Date: 1989
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097133368900100203 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:psydev:v:1:y:1989:i:2:p:165-175

DOI: 10.1177/097133368900100203

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Psychology and Developing Societies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().