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.
The 2 subtests
Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
WPPSI items remain under Pearson copyright. We document the test's history.
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