The influence of parents' education in the Italian standardization sample of the WISC-III

• We studied the influences of parental education on the performance in the WISC-III.
• Procedures used zero-order correlations and multivariate analysis of variance.
• Higher parental education predicts higher performance of children in the WISC-III.

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III Edition is the most commonly used intelligence test for children in Italy. Differences in parents' educational levels were analysed for the WISC-III Italian standardization sample of 2200 children ranging from six to sixteen years of age. Data analyses were carried out on scaled scores for the subtests, on IQ scores for the three IQs, on the Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Organization, Freedom from Distractibility, Processing Speed Indexes, and on the General Ability Index.Results showed that, while parental influence on children's subtests, IQs, Indexes and GAI is independent of the parent's gender, it varies as a function of the parent's level of education with a higher level of education having the highest influence.These results may be in agreement with those researchers that consider parental education more important than the parents' gender as a source of influence on the cognitive performance of their children.We find statistically significant differences for each subtest, IQ, and Index in relation to parental education, with higher scores associated to a higher level of parental education. Performance IQ seems less sensible to parental education than Verbal IQ.