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Documentation · 1967

Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI): Preschool Wechsler scale

David Wechsler's preschool-age adaptation of the WISC. The 1967 WPPSI covered ages 4 to 6:5; subsequent revisions extended down to age 2:6. The WPPSI completed Wechsler's three-instrument family (WAIS for adults, WISC for school-age children, WPPSI for preschoolers) that has dominated individually-administered cognitive assessment for over 70 years.

Read About the Test

About the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI)

By the mid-1960s the WAIS (1955, formerly Wechsler-Bellevue 1939) was the dominant adult test and the WISC (1949) was the dominant school-age test, but preschoolers (ages 4-6) had no Wechsler instrument. They were typically tested with the Stanford-Binet, but the SB at this age range was administratively demanding and the Wechsler community wanted a preschool option matching their family of instruments.

The 1967 WPPSI introduced age-appropriate subtests: Information, Vocabulary, Arithmetic, Similarities, and Comprehension for the Verbal Scale; Animal House (a child-friendly digit-symbol task), Picture Completion, Mazes, Geometric Design, and Block Design for the Performance Scale. Total testing time was about 60-75 minutes, considered demanding but feasible for cooperative 4-6-year-olds.

The WPPSI went through revisions in 1989 (WPPSI-R, extended down to age 3:0), 2002 (WPPSI-III, extended down to age 2:6), and 2012 (WPPSI-IV, current). The current WPPSI-IV covers ages 2:6 to 7:7 and reports five composite scores. Like its WAIS and WISC siblings, the WPPSI is the most-used preschool individual cognitive assessment in clinical and educational practice.

Copyright note: WPPSI items are copyrighted (Pearson). This page documents the test's history.

The 2 subtests

#1
Verbal Scale Information, Vocabulary, Arithmetic, Similarities, Comprehension - adapted for preschool difficulty.
Copyrighted
#2
Performance Scale Animal House (child digit-symbol), Picture Completion, Mazes, Geometric Design, Block Design.
Copyrighted

Read the Original

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Sample Items (Illustrative)

Items are presented verbally or visually, with children responding by speaking or manipulating objects. Responses are scored based on accuracy and completeness, with some items allowing partial credit for near-correct answers.

Sample 1 · Verbal Scale: Information
What is the color of the sky on a clear day?
Example response: Blue
Sample 2 · Verbal Scale: Similarities
In what way are a cat and a dog alike?
Example response: They are both animals.
Sample 3 · Performance Scale: Picture Completion
Look at this picture of a house. What important part is missing?
Example response: The door
Sample 4 · Performance Scale: Block Design
Use these blocks to make a pattern that looks like this picture.
Example response: Correctly arranging the blocks to match the given pattern
Sample 5 · Verbal Scale: Comprehension
Why do we wear shoes?
Example response: To protect our feet

These are illustrative samples, not actual items from the protected test.

Source

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

David Wechsler (1967). Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI).

WPPSI items remain under Pearson copyright. We document the test's history.

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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 · CSL JSON

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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