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Public Domain · 1941

SRA Primary Mental Abilities Test: Thurstone PMA for classroom

The classroom-deployable version of Thurstone's Primary Mental Abilities battery. Science Research Associates (SRA), founded specifically to publish this test, packaged Thurstone's 7-factor system into a 50-minute school-administrable form. One of the most widely-used American school cognitive tests of the 1940s and 1950s.

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About the SRA Primary Mental Abilities Test

Thurstone's 1938 Primary Mental Abilities monograph was a research document - it described an analytical framework but did not provide a classroom-deployable test. To bring the PMA system into schools, Thurstone and his wife Thelma founded Science Research Associates (SRA) in 1938 and spent three years developing a packaged version.

The 1941 SRA-PMA covered 5 of the original 7 factors (Verbal Meaning, Number Facility, Spatial Relations, Word Fluency, Reasoning) - the two factors dropped (Memory and Perceptual Speed) were considered less reliable in group administration. Total testing time was 50 minutes for the standard form.

SRA-PMA was the most influential American school cognitive test of the 1940s and remained widely used into the 1970s. Its 5-factor structure directly shaped the WISC and Stanford-Binet revisions of that era. The test also normalized the idea that cognitive ability is multi-dimensional - that a child can be strong in some abilities while weak in others - in a way that single-score tests like Otis Quick-Scoring did not.

The 5 subtests

#V
Verbal Meaning Vocabulary - which word means the same as the target word?
Interactive
#N
Number Facility Speeded arithmetic - mental computation under time pressure.
Interactive
#S
Spatial Relations Identify which rotation of a 2D figure matches a target.
Interactive
#W
Word Fluency Generate as many words as possible that meet a criterion (start with letter, etc.).
Timed Production
#R
Reasoning Letter series, number series, abstract pattern recognition.
Interactive

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at the grade 4-7 difficulty level.

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About these items: These SRA Primary Mental Abilities Test items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1941 test, NOT verbatim copies of the historical items. Where the original is a 1-on-1 oral or physical-apparatus test (e.g., examiner shows a card, child draws a shape), we have adapted the format to self-administered multiple choice.

Source

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

Thurstone, L. L. & Thurstone, T. G. (1941). SRA Primary Mental Abilities Test. Chicago: Science Research Associates.

The Thurstones founded Science Research Associates in 1938 specifically to publish the SRA-PMA. The test went through multiple revisions (1947, 1953, 1962) but its core 5-factor structure (Verbal, Number, Spatial, Memory, Reasoning) persisted.

Cite this page

This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

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