2.4.1 Sternberg triarchic abilities test

A measure was developed to assess the components of Sternberg's theory (Sternberg, 1985a, 1988). The Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test (STAT; Sternberg, 1991a, 1991b, 1993) measures three domains of mental processing (analytical, creative, and practical), which reflect the subtheories outlined above. Analytical questions address the skill to learn from context and reason inductively (i.e., the relation of cognition to the internal world). Creative questions address the skill to cope with novelty (i.e., the relation of cognition to experience). And practical questions address the skill to solve real-world, everyday problems (i.e., the relation of cognition to the external world).

The current version of the STAT (1993) has nine four-option multiple-choice subtests, each consisting of four items, plus three essays. The nine multiple-choice subtests represent a crossing of three kinds of process domains (analytical, creative, and practical) with three major content domains (verbal, quantitative, and figural). The three essays assess performance in analytical, creative, and practical domains. We describe each of the subtests below, organized around the process domains.

There are four analytical subtests of the STAT, one for each content area (multiple-choice verbal, multiple-choice quantitative, multiple-choice figural, and essay). Traditional verbal skill tests (e.g., synonym/antonym tests) correlate highly with overall cognitive ability (see Sternberg and Powell, 1983), but they are more measures of achievement than of skill. In other words, they emphasize the products over the process of learning. Analytical-verbal skills are measured in the STAT by assessing the skill to learn from context. Vocabulary is viewed as a proxy for the skill to pick up information from relevant context (see Sternberg, 1987). The analytical-quantitative section consists of items that measure inductive reasoning skill in the numerical domain. The analytical-figural items similarly measure inductive reasoning skill with either figure classification or figure analogy problems. In the figure classification test, the examinee must indicate which figure does not belong with the others. The four analytical subtests are described below:

  1. Analytical-Verbal (neologisms). Students see a novel word embedded in a paragraph, and have to infer its meaning from the context.
  2. Analytical-Quantitative (number series). Students have to say what number should come next in a series of numbers.
  3. Analytical-Figural (matrices). Students see a figural matrix with the lower right entry missing, and have to say which of the options fits into the missing space.
  4. Analytical-Essay. Students are required to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of having police or security guards in a school building.

The creative portion of the STAT also consists of four subtests (multiple-choice verbal, multiple-choice quantitative, multiple-choice figural, and essay). The creative-verbal questions require counterfactual reasoning and attempt to assess the skill to think in relatively novel ways. In the creative-quantitative questions, symbols are used in place of certain numbers requiring the examinee to make a substitution. The creative-figural items require the examinee to complete a series in a domain separate from the one in which they inferred the completion rule. The four creative subtests are described below:

  1. Creative-Verbal (novel analogies). Students are presented with verbal analogies preceded by counterfactual premises (e.g., money falls off trees), and must solve the analogies as though the counterfactual premises were true.
  2. Creative-Quantitative (novel number operations). Students are presented with rules for novel number operation (e.g., flix, for which numerical manipulations differ depending upon whether the first of two operands is greater than, equal to, or less than the second). Students have to use the novel number operations to solve presented math problems.
  3. Creative-Figural (novel series completion). Students are first presented with a figural series that involves one or more transformations; they then must apply the rule of the original series to a new figure with a different appearance, to complete a new series.
  4. Creative-Essay. Students are required to describe how they would reform their school system to produce an ideal one.