Variation in Raven's Progressive Matrices scores across time and place

Abstract

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. The paper describes a cross-cultural and historical meta-analysis of Raven's Progressive Matrices. Data were analyzed of 798 samples from 45 countries (N = 244,316), which were published between 1944 and 2003. Country-level indicators of educational permeation (which involves a broad set of interrelated educational input and output factors that are strongly related to economic development), the samples' educational age, and publication year were all independently related to performance on Raven's matrices. Our data suggest that the Flynn effect can be found in high as well as low GNP countries, although its size is moderated by education-related sample and country characteristics and seems to be smaller in developed than in emerging countries.© 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Raven's Progressive Matrices are a series of multiple-choice items of abstract reasoning. Each item depicts an abstract pattern in a two by two or three by three matrix; all cells contain a figure except for the cell in the right lower corner. Participants are asked to identify the missing segment that would best complement the pattern constituted by the other cells among a set of alternatives that are positioned beneath the matrix. John C. Raven published the first version of the test in 1938 and a revised version in 1956; the three versions of the test (Advanced, Colored, and Standard Progressive Matrices) have since been among the most widely-used intelligence tests. Its intuitively appealing question format and the use of figure stimuli have made the test attractive for cross-cultural comparisons. A meta-analysis of crosscultural intelligence test scores showed that the Raven is the second most used test after the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children (Van de Vijver, 1997). This widespread usage makes the test an interesting instrument for a cross-cultural meta-analysis. Moreover, the period in which the Raven has been used in various countries is long enough for enabling a study of the temporal patterning of scores. In the present paper, we report a meta-analysis of Raven performance of children and adults from 45 countries across a time span of 60 years.Cross-cultural comparisons with the Raven tests are often conducted from the premise that the instrument measures crosscultural differences in intelligence that are not confounded by other cultural or national differences, such as education and affluence (Raven, 2000;Rushton, Skuy, & Bons, 2004). 'Culture-free ' (Cattell, 1940), 'culture-fair ' (Cattell & Cattell, 1963), and 'culture-reduced ' (Jensen, 1980) are all terms that have been proposed to describe the Raven or similar t...

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