Volume 3 Number 1
October 1963

Joyce Kayser

As a recent employee of the Southern Ute Tribe, the author had occasion to check the school records of five Southern Ute junior high school students who had been or, it was feared, soon would be in trouble with the school. Each of the students had done his best work in the third grade, and the superintendent’s office was contacted to see if all had perhaps had the same third grade teacher. This was definitely not the case, and the question was dropped until Herbert Peters’ article, "Performance of Hopi Children on Four Intelligence Tests," appeared in Journal of American Indian Education, January, 1963. Peters stated, "Performance [of 59 Hopi children attending the Hopi Mission School at Oraibi] seems to reach its peak in Grades III and IV after which learning appears to be more difficult." (1:27-31) He suggests that two aspects of acculturation account for this:

The results of my preliminary study agree with Peters’ findings in the main but do not seem to support his explanation.

Subjects were 207 students, 104 boys and 103 girls, who will be in grades 7 through 12 during the school year 1963-64, plus the class which graduated from high school in 1963--a total of seven classes. These students attend public school in a small town in southwestern Colorado where children of three ethnic groups—Soutbern Ute, Spanish-American (see Note 1) and, to use the local terminology, Anglo—have attended school side-by-side since the beginning of the 1956-57 school year.

Prior to that time most of the Utes, though apparently never all of them, attended the Indian school administered and taught by BIA personnel. Presently Navaho children live in BIA-administered dormitories and attend the public school; their records and those of other non-Ute Indian students, almost entirely children of BIA employees, have been eliminated from the study. Thus where "Indian" appears it means Southern Ute Indian and, except in one instance, an enrolled member of the tribe.

Additional omissions are those students with more than three grades missing from their records, students who were more than once not promoted and, when a class had a much greater proportion of either boys or girls of a particular ethnic group, some of these records were randomly omitted in order to make the numbers more comparable. Only Anglo and Spanish* students were omitted for this reason, the Utes being fewer in number.

The old Indian school practice of giving only Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory ratings in the first two grades resulted in the omission of the records of several Ute students when later two or more grades were missing from their records.

It is not felt that any significant bias of findings should result from the above omissions. However, a definite bias in favor of academic subjects was built into the study by omitting grades given in the elementary school categories of deportment and work habits and such secondary school subjects as band, shop, general office practice and typing and, as mentioned above, by omitting entirely the records of students who did not achieve scholastically.

In determining in which grade each ethnic group did its best work, it was found that of the seven classes of Utes, three and one-third -did their best work in the third grade, two and one-sixth in the second, two-thirds in the fourth, one-half in the first, and one-third in the fifth. Four Spanish classes did their best work in the second grade, two and one-half in the third and one-half in the fourth. Four of the Anglo classes did their best work in the first grade, two in the sixth, and one in the second. These results would seem not to support Peters’ explanation that the obvious aspects of the dominant culture are picked up early in the school career and that performance then diminishes, since it is the Anglo group which achieves most highly the earliest and the Ute the latest of the three ethnic groups.

Manipulation of the statistics to make the number of pupils equal in each ethnic group would alter the place of the Ute curve but not its form; similarly a graph breaking the three ethnic groups into boys and girls shows the same curve and seems to add no new information. Girls scored more highly in the second grade, boys in the first and third grades and after that there is almost no difference.

Peters’ data on performance of Hopi children forms curves of almost precisely the same configuration except in the case of the P.M.A. scores. (1-30) He notes that "there appears to be a definite curvilinear relationship between age and I.Q. scores" and that "peak performance was reached at the 7, 8, or 9 year level." ( 1: 3 1 ) These findings seem to show that this is true for children of the dominant culture as well as those of the two minority cultures. This, coupled with the previously noted fact that Anglos as classes in school do better earlier than either the Spanish or the Utes, leads one to question the adequacy of an enculturation explanation. An exception may be that the higher performance of the Anglo children beginning with grade 6 is explained by their ethnicity in that attendance at college is a more realizable goal for them and this, plus the necessity for achieving scholastically if they are to do so, forms a stronger motivation in the secondary grades.

This study, as mentioned before, is a preliminary one and obviously has dealt with the subject of the school grade (and therefore also roughly the age) in which children do their most higbly-scored work, not with the question of how high their work actually scored. Ute graduates of the high school class of 1963, for instance, ranked proportionately lower than their Spanish and Anglo classmates. The author hopes to explore this further in the near future, together with other factors possibly related to scholastic performance.

1. All students classified here as Spanish come from homes in which Spanish or Spanish and English are spoken; some few thought to be of Spanish culture were nevertheless omitted if English was said to be the language of the home.

Peters, Herbert D. "Performance of Hopi Children on Four Intelligence Tests," Journal of American Indian Education, Vol. 2, No. 2 (January, 1963).