The Equivalence of Semantic and Figural Presentation of the Same Test Items

Abstract

A 30-item multiple choice word analogy test and a corresponding 30-item picture analogy test (in which the pictures corresponded to the words in the word analogy test) were administered to 289 civil service clerical employees. The equivalence of semantic (word) and figural (picture) presentation of the same item was determined by comparing the responses of each subject on each item pair. The proportion of correspondent responses (both items answered correctly or both items answered incorrectly) ranged from .69 to .91 with a median of .84. The proportion of correspondent responses significantly exceeded the expected chance proportion on 27 of the 30 item pairs. The correlation between scores on the two test forms was .86. Over 84% of the respondents gave correspondent responses with greater than chance frequency. Score distributions were practically identical. It was concluded that semantic and figural parallel test forms can be constructed.