The Development and Validation of a Reliable Alternate Form for Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices

Abstract

The development of an alternate form for Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) Test is described. Items for each of the original 60 items of the SPM were developed to be comparable to the corresponding original items in terms of the underlying strategy and difficulty. An alternate form reliability analysis on a diverse group of 449 children (77 African-American, 122 Asian, 54 Filipino, 156 Latino/Hispanic, 38 white, and 2 other) showed an alternate form reliability coefficient of .90. Kuder-Richardson reliabilities of the newly developed alternate and the SPM were identical at .94: A Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample test, moreover, revealed no significant differences in central tendency, dispersion, and skewness for distributions of individual item difficulties. In addition, the two tests showed comparable predictive validity coefficients. The alternate form resolves one limitation of the SPM and could provide widespread utility as a research tool.