Finally, the practical portion of the STAT is designed to assess the skill to apply knowledge to problems with practical relevance. Practical-verbal items require the examinee to answer everyday inferential reasoning problems. Practical-quantitative items require the examinee to reason quantitatively with practical everyday problems of the kind he or she might face in everyday life. Items in the practical-figural portion require the skill to plan a route efficiently, given the information in a map or diagram. The four practical subtests are described below:

9. Practical-Verbal (everyday reasoning). Students have to solve a set of everyday problems in the life of an adolescent (e.g., what to do about a friend who seems to have a substance-abuse problem).
10. Practical-Quantitative (everyday math). Students have to solve math problems based on scenarios requiring the use of math in everyday life (e.g., buying tickets for a ballgame or making chocolate chip cookies).
11. Practical-Figural (route planning). Students are presented with a map of an area (e.g., an entertainment park), and have to answer questions about navigating effectively through the area depicted by the map.
12. Practical-Essay. Students are required to specify a problem in their life, and to state three practical solutions for solving it.

The multiple-choice questions are scored using an answer key. The essays are scored by trained raters according to the extent to which the answer reflects analytical, creative, and practical thinking. In a pilot use of the STAT (Sternberg and Clinkenbeard, 1995), a variety of skill tests were administered to 64 participants. The other tests used were the Terman Concept Mastery Test (primarily a test of crystallized skills), the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (a verbal test of critical thinking), the Cattell Culture Fair Test of g (primarily a test of fluid skills), and a homemade test of insight problems (adapted from Sternberg, 1986). Respective correlations of the STAT with these tests were, for the analytical .49, .50, .50, and .47 (all significant); for the creative, .43, .53, .55, and .59 (all significant); and for the practical .21, .32, .36, and .21 (the second and third significant). Of the three processing domains measured by the STAT, the one that correlated the least with more traditional measures of general cognition was practical skill.

In a subsequent study (Sternberg, Ferrari, Clinkenbeard, and Grigorenko, 1996; Sternberg, Grigorenko, Ferrari, and Clinkenbeard, 1999), the STAT was administered to 324 children around the United States and in some other countries who were identified by their schools as gifted by any standard whatsoever. Children were selected for a summer psychology program at Yale (college-level) if they fell into one of five skill groupings: high analytical, high creative, high practical, high balanced (high in all three skills), or low balanced (low in all three skills). Students who came to Yale were then divided into four instructional groups. Students in all four instructional groups used the same introductory-psychology textbook (a preliminary version of Sternberg [1995b]) and listened to the same psychology lectures. What differed among them was the type of afternoon discussion section to which they were assigned. They were assigned to an instructional condition that emphasized either memory, analytical, creative, or practical instruction. For example, in the memory condition, they might be asked to describe the main tenets of a major theory of depression. In the analytical condition, they might be asked to compare and contrast two theories of depression. In the creative condition, they might be asked to formulate their own theory of depression. In the practical condition, they might be asked how they could use what they had learned about depression to help a friend who was depressed.