Raven's Progressive Matrices

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Raven's Progressive Matrices are widely used non-verbal intelligence tests. In each test item, one is asked to find the missing part required to complete a pattern. Each Set of items gets progressively harder, requiring greater cognitive capacity to encode and analyze. The test is considered by many intelligence experts to be one of the most g-loaded in existence.

The matrices are offered in three different forms for different ability levels, and for age ranges from five through adult:

Coloured Progressive Matrices (younger children and special groups)
Standard Progressive Matrices (average 6 to 80 year olds)
Advanced Progressive Matrices (above average adolescents & adults)

According to their author, Raven's Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary tests measure the two main components of general intelligence (originally identified by Spearman): the ability to think clearly and make sense of complexity, which is known as eductive ability (from the Latin root "educere", meaning "to draw out"; and the ability to store and reproduce information, known as reproductive ability.

Adequate standardization, ease of use (without written or complex instructions), and minimal cost per person tested are the main reasons for its widespread international use in most countries of the world. It appears to measure a type of reasoning ability which is fundamental to making sense out of the "booming buzzing confusion" in all walks of life. Thus, it has among the highest predictive validities of any test in most occupational groups and, even more importantly, in predicting social mobility ... the level of job a person will attain and retain. Although it is sometimes criticized for being costly, this is based on a failure to calculate cost per person tested with re-usable test booklets that can be used up to 50 times each.

The authors of the Manual recommend that, when used in selection, RPM scores are set in the context of information relating to Raven's framework for the assessmet of Competence.

Some of the most fundamental research in cognitive psychology has been carried out with the RPM. The tests have been shown to work - scale - measure the same thing - in a vast variety of cultural groups. There is no truth in the assertion that the low mean scores obtained in some groups arise from a general lack of familiarity with the way of thought measured by the test. Two remarkable, and relatively recent, findings are that, on the one hand, the actual scores obtained by people living in most countries with a tradition of literacy - from China, Russia, and India through Europe to Kuwait - are very similar at any point in time. On the other hand, in all countries, the scores have increased dramatically over time ... such that 50% of our grandparents would be assigned to special education classes if they were judged against today's norms (see Flynn effect). Yet none of the common explanations - access to television, changes in education, changes in family size etc. - hold up. The explanation seems to have more in common with those put forward to explain the parallel increase in life expectancy ... which has doubled over the same period of time.

John Carlyle Raven first published his Progressive Matrices in the United Kingdom in 1938. His three sons established Scotland-based test publisher J C Raven Ltd. in 1972. In 2004, Harcourt Assessment, Inc. a division of Harcourt Education acquired J C Raven Ltd.