Race differences and type II errors: A comment on Borkowski and Krause

Magnitude comparisons of black-white differences on a variety of cognitive tests give a somewhat different picture of the results of a small-sample study by Borkowski and Krause (1983), who based their conclusions mainly on significance tests. Some of the critical variables in the study consisted of differences scores with unacceptably low reliability, inclining the results toward the favored hypothesis, namely, that the locus of the difference between blacks and whites in psychometric intelligence lies in metaprocesses, or the executive system, and not in the elementary cognitive processes. The results actually show fairly comparable black-white differences in measures of both types of processes.