Development of the Ravens Progressive Matrices for Pearson

The Psychometrics Centre is currently developing, standardizing and validating parallel versions of the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices for Talent Lens, the occupational testing division of Pearson Assessment. This is the latest development in the growth of this family of ability tests.

The development of new items for the Ravens Item Bank will also enable us to identify item parameters for a larger pool, thereby creating the possibility of making Ravens tests adaptive. Preliminary work has demonstrated that an adaptive version of the Ravens can obtain the same reliability as the full 60 item version with less than 20 items.

The project follows on from the UK standardisation of the Ravens Progressive Matrices Plus and the Coloured Progressive Matrices for Pearson Educational in 2003-05. In that project, data were collected from over 1,200 children in more than 120 nurseries and primary and secondary schools throughout the United Kingdom. The sampling plan was based on the national Census for the country, with representative proportions from each region, ethnic group and parental educational level and, of course, equal numbers of boys and girls in each group. In addition to the Ravens tests themselves, the accompanying vocabulary scales, the Crichton for younger children and the Mill Hill for those over 8 years, were also included. The published tests provide an easy and ready to use assessment of basic intelligence for the educational community.