Performance on Raven's matrices by African and White university students in South Africa

Untimed Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) were administered to 30 9 17- to 23-year-old students at the University of the Witwatersrand and th e Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg, South Africa (173 Africans, 13 6 Whites; 205 women, 104 men). African students solved an average of 44 of the 60 problems whereas White students solved an average of 54 of the probl ems (p<0.001). By the standards of the 1993 US normative sample, the Africa n university students scored at the 14th percentile and the White universit y students scored at the 61st percentile (IQ equivalents of 84 and 104, res pectively). The African-White differences were found to be greater on those items of the SPM with the highest item-total correlations, indicating a di fference in g, or the general factor of intelligence. A small sex differenc e favoring males was found in both the African and the White samples, but u nrelated to g.