SRA Primary Mental Abilities Test: Thurstone PMA for classroom

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

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at the grade 4-7 difficulty level.

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All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from: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