Raven's Progressive Matrices: Visual matrix-completion test

About the Raven's Progressive Matrices

John C. Raven was a young British psychologist working with Lionel Penrose on hereditary mental defect studies in the early 1930s. The two needed a non-verbal cognitive measure that could be administered through a translator if necessary - the Stanford-Binet was too verbal, and the existing performance tests (Pintner-Paterson, Kohs) required physical materials that were hard to transport to fieldwork sites. Raven set out to build a non-verbal test that used only printed pages.

Raven's solution was a series of 3x3 grids of abstract visual patterns. Each grid had one cell missing; the subject had to identify the underlying rule and select the missing piece from 6-8 options. The format was elegant: completely non-verbal, easy to administer, and capable of measuring abstract reasoning ability without relying on cultural knowledge. Raven published the Standard Progressive Matrices in 1938.

The Progressive Matrices became the most-administered non-verbal intelligence test in the world. They have been used in cross-cultural research, clinical practice, military classification (UK, France, many others), and educational assessment for nearly a century. The 1947 Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) extended the difficulty range to discriminate at the high end. The 1947 Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) adapted the format for children under 10 and for clinical populations.

Despite the test's massive influence, the actual Raven items remain under Pearson copyright. The matrix format itself - 3x3 grids with one missing cell - is not patentable, and many similar tests exist (Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test 1949 also uses matrices). But Raven's specific items are not freely available.

The 3 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Raven's Progressive Matrices and all derivatives remain under active copyright (Pearson Assessment, formerly Harcourt). We cannot provide the actual items. This page documents the test's history and significance.