Raven's - Educational

J.C. Raven

Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales enjoy a long and famous history in the assessment of general cognitive abilities in children.

The Progressive Matrices usefully provide an assessment of non-verbal ability, an important feature for ethnically diverse populations, and the Vocabulary Scales provide scores in the verbal domain.

The Matrices measure educative ability, with the Vocabulary Scales providing measures of reproductive ability. Together these two components can be thought of as measuring ‘General Ability’ – often referred to as ‘g’ in the psychological literature.

This important instrument has now been restandardised for the UK population.

In this standardisation study 640 children aged between four and 11 years were administered the Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) and the Crichton Vocabulary Scale (CVS) and 960 children aged between seven and 18 years received the Standard Progressive Matrices - Plus version (SPM-Plus) and Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (MHV).

The data was collected in groups for the SPM+ and MHV and comparison studies against individual administration were completed. Equating studies on other forms of the progressive matrices and vocabulary scales (e.g. SPM-Classic, CPM-parallel) were also carried out.

This standardisation represents the most significant development for the children's version of the Raven's progressive matrices and Vocabulary Scales since the 1979 & 1982 standardisations with children aged from five to 16 years.

The re-standardisation means that you can confidently use the Raven's to assess non-verbal and verbal aspect of general ability for children in the UK.

Along with this standardisation, an extensive redesign of the product was completed, simplifying and updating materials. This makes the test more attractive and easier to use.

A measure of educative ability – the ability to make sense and meaning out of complex or confusing data; the ability to perceive new patterns and relationships, and to forge (largely non-verbal) constructs which make it easy to handle complexity.

The following kits are available for children:

• Raven's - Educational CPM/CVS Complete Kit:

      Individually administered test for children aged 4 to 11years (easier items)

• Raven's - Educational SPM+/MHV Complete Kit:

       Individually and Group administered test for children and adolescents aged 7 to 18 years.

N.B. There is an overlap in the normative data for the CPM/CVS kit and SPM+/MHV kit for children aged between 7 to 11 years. It is advised that the examiner uses their professional judgement as to which would be the most appropriate test for their use when they are seeing children within this age range. CPM/CVS is an individually administered test and has easier items than SPM+/MHV. The SPM+/MHV can be administered individually and in groups.