Interactive Computer Administration of a Spatial Reasoning Test

摘要

This report describes a pilot study on the development and administration of a test using a spatial reasoning problem, the 15-puzzle. The test utilized the on-line capabilities of a real-time computer (1) to record an examinee's progress on each problem through a sequence of problem-solving 'moves' and (2) to collect additional on-line data that might be of relevance to the evaluation of examinee performance (e.g., number of illegal and repeated moves, response latency trends). The examinees, 61 students in an introductory psychology class, were required to type a sequence of moves that would bring one 4 x 4 array of scrambled numbers (start configuration) into agreement with a second 4 x 4 array (goal configuration), using as few moves as possible. Data analyses emphasized the comparison of several methods of indexing problem difficulty, methods of scoring individual performance, and the relationship between response latency data, performance, and problem-solving strategy. Subjective ratings of the perceived difficulty of replications of the 15-puzzle were obtained from a separate student sample to investigate (1) the subjective dimensions used by students in evaluating the difficulty of this problem type, (2) how accurately the actual performance difficulty of these problems could be evaluated by students, and (3) whether there were reliable individual differences in difficulty perceptions related to actual performance differences.