Warning: Subtle Aspects of Strategy Assessment May Affect Correlations among Spatial Tests

Abstract

In this study, preliminary to a larger experiment, 42 participants completed four different spatial tests and, after each test, a strategy questionnaire. For half of the participants, visualizational strategies were presented first in this questionnaire, and for the other half, analytical strategies. The order of strategy descriptions had effects on the strategies reported and on the intercorrelations among the spatial tests and between the spatial tests and an inductive-reasoning test. In the group first presented with visualizational strategies, intercorrelations among the spatial tests were higher and correlations with the reasoning test were lower than in the group first presented with analytical strategies. Bootstrap analyses with 100 random splits of the sample confirmed this result. The findings are interpreted as indications of a priming effect by the strategy descriptions which affected the way participants dealt with subsequent tests. Implications for strategy assessment are discussed.