The Development Of Figure Reasoning Test For Middle School Students

Reasoning ability is an important component of intelligence and it is often used as an important measure of fluid intelligence.There are many kinds of tests to measure reasoning ability,such as text,number and figure reasoning,among which figure reasoning test is widely used in the world due to its cross-cultural and cross-national advantages.The purpose of this research is to draw lessons from the domestic and foreign excellent figure reasoning test,to construct a suitable figure reasoning test for middle school students,in order to accurately evaluate the reasoning ability of middle school students.The main contents of this study include three parts:First,the structure,form and rules of existing figure reasoning tests are studied and sorted out.This will lay a foundation for the determination of test structure and the item's problem solving rules in this study,and also inspire the setting of instruction,examples and item arrangement order.Second,establish the structure and content of the test.The figure reasoning test for middle school students(FRT)consists of two sub-tests: matrix reasoning and serial reasoning.After the initial determination of the test format,this study compiled the test items.The problem solving rules of the item are composed of the rules sorted out by the existing figure reasoning tests.The test draft contains 51 items,among which 26 items are matrix reasoning items and 25 items are sequential reasoning items.The test materials are all composed of geometric figures without semantic meaning.271 valid data were collected for the test draft.Project analysis(including difficulty and discrimination analysis)was carried out.According to the analysis results,the test draft was deleted and modified,and the official version of FRT was finally obtained.The formal test consists of 46 items,including 22 for matrix reasoning subtest and 24 for sequential reasoning subtest.Third,the formal test was applied to the middle school students,and 1005 valid data were obtained.Descriptive statistics,correlation test,difference test and psychometrics analysis were carried out on the test data.This research results showed that:(1)The participants' scores on the full scale increased with the increase of grade,and there was a significant difference between grades.(2)Medium difficulty items(0.7?P>0.30)accounted for 57% of all test items,and excellent discrimination items(D?0.3)accounted for 60% of all test items,indicating that the difficulty and differentiation of FRT were ideal.(3)Cronbach's ? of the FRT was 0.817,half-reliability was 0.826,and retest reliability was 0.747,indicating that the test had good reliability and stability.(4)The correlation between FRT and Combined Raven's Test was moderate,with a correlation coefficient of 0.408;Confirmatory factor analysis found that the fitting index of the FRT is 0.902-0.943,which indicates that the test has good criterion correlation validity and structural validity.(5)In the three-parameter Logistic item response theory model,FRT provided the maximum information when the ability value of the participants was 0.125,which indicated that the test was the most accurate for the participants' assessment of medium reasoning ability.The test information function shows that FRT has better measurement accuracy for participants with ? values in the range of [-1.03,2.76],especially for the ability evaluation of participants with ? values around 0.125,indicating that FRT is more accurate in assessing the ability of participents at moderate low to high levels.(6)This study developed the reference norm of FRT in Shanghai,which laid a foundation for the further application and promotion of the test.In summary,FRT is a simple and effective evaluation tool to measure the reasoning ability of middle school students.