Bojana Vucicevic

Background. Questions regarding what exactly is measured by the most popular intelligence test — Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM), and how the age-dependent characteristics of thinking process are impacting the performance, are still debatable and insufficiently studied. 

Objective. The study had its purpose to reveal the characteristics of the thinking process in the elementary school students, at the age of 7 and 9, engaged in the performance of the SPM tasks. 

Methods. A three-stage study combining the cross-sectional and longitudinal methods with content analysis of children’s justifications for choosing specific answers on different test items. 

Sample. 46 students from Moscow school with an advanced level of complexity (21 boys and 25 girls) took the test twice — in the 1st grade (mean age 7,5 years, range: 6,11–8,0) and in the 3rd grade (mean age 9,6 years, range: 9,0–10,0). 

Results. The analysis of children’s explanations, recorded while they were solving the SPM problems aloud, and the logical analysis of their wrong answers, based on their concordance with the structure of the SPM test, showed that there are not only quantitative, but also qualitative changes in intellectual development of children aged 7 and 9. 

Conclusion. The same mistake made by children of different age might be an indicator of the different levels of their intellectual abilities. The different ways they use to solve the SPM tasks might be due to the qualitatively different thinking processes, characteristic for a certain age. Therefore, the results obtained by means of SPM test must be supplemented with the qualitative analysis of wrong answers in order to assess the true level of mental abilities of a child at the elementary school level.