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 our ethnically diverse population, and the Vocabulary Scales provide scores in the verbal domain.
The Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales are in wide use throughout the world and come in a variety of formats to cover educational, clinical and occupational uses.
The Matrices measure eductive 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.
Raven’s Progressive Matrices
A measure of eductive 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 Raven’s Progressive Matrices comes in 3 formats:
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Colour Progressive Matrices (CPM) (for use with children and elderly people)
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Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) (for use with the general population)
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Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) (top 20% of the population)
Raven’s Vocabulary Scales
Measures of reproductive ability – the ability to store, process and utilise a culture’s store of (largely verbal) information and knowledge.
There are 3 formats for the Raven’s Vocabulary Scales:
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Crichton Vocabulary Scales (CVS) (for use with the CPM)
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Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (MHV) (for use with SPM)
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MHV – Senior Form (for use with APM)
Although these two abilities frequently work in tandem, they are very different from each other. Many educational and clinical settings call for both to be assessed and interpreted.
Raven’s Progressive Matrices have a wide variety of applications including:
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In educational settings the Matrices have a long history of application and use. Scores are relatively unaffected by linguistic and ethnic background and can be used as a good predictor of success in an educational context for both children and adults.
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In clinical settings the reliability of the measures and lack of bias makes them ideal tools in neuropsychological assessment, working with elderly people and many clinical groups whose particular needs make the demands of more traditional cognitive testing unrealistic.
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For many years the Matrices have found wide application in numerous research studies. Their strong theoretical background, lengthy citation count and application across multiple language, ethnic and cultural groups make them ideal tools for investigations requiring measurements of cognitive abilities in a wide range of organisational, educational and clinical settings.
For Adults, the following versions are available:
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SPM / MHV kit
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APM / MHV kit
Other forms of SPM and MHV are also available, please contact Customer Services on 0845 630 88 88 for more information.
If you want to use CPM, please call Customer Services on 0845 630 88 88 for more information.
If you want to use the APM in an organisational and HR setting, please see Raven's Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales| (on our TalentLens website) for the most up-to-date version and available format options.