A Comparison between the Psychometric Properties of Visuospatial and Verbal- Analytic Items in the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices

Document Type : Original Article

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College of Education, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman.

10.18576/ijlms/040203

Abstract

The current study investigated the psychometric properties of two subsets of the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices Test (APM) items, visuospatial (13 items) and verbal-analytic (12 items) as categorized by DeShon, Chan and Weissbein (1955). A model of 25 items was first subjected to confirmatory factor analysis which reduced these items to 15 which fitted the data adequately. Nine items were visuospatial and 6 were verbal-analytic. This finding lends support to the empirical literature which found some evidence of the still debatable issue concerning the multi-dimensionality of the APM. The two subsets were found to be comparable in many respects (item difficulties and discriminations, average performance of students in the two subsets, correlation with total APM score). No gender differences were found in both subsets. Moreover, while the visuospatial items were found to be more internally consistent than the verbal-analytic items, this was attributed to the smaller number of the latter subset of items in the model. The visuospatial subset had a small positive but significant correlation with GPA. Conversely, the verbal-analytic subset had a small positive insignificant correlation with GPA. No gender differences in both subsets were observed.

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