“How to Gain 11 IQ Points in 10 Minutes: Thinking Aloud Improves Raven’s Matrices Performance in Older Adults”, 2009-08-03 (; backlinks):
Few studies have examined the impact of age on reactivity to concurrent think-aloud (TA) verbal reports. An initial pilot study with 30 younger and 31 older adults revealed that thinking aloud improves older adult performance on a short form of the Raven’s Matrices…but did not affect other tasks.
In the replication experiment, 30 older adults (mean age = 73.0) performed the Raven’s Matrices and 3 other tasks to replicate and extend the findings of the initial study.
Once again, older adults performed statistically-significantly better only on the Raven’s Matrices while thinking aloud. Performance gains on this task were substantial (d = 0.73 and 0.92 in Experiments 1 & 2, respectively), corresponding to a fluid intelligence increase of nearly one standard deviation.
[Keywords: think-aloud, concurrent verbalization, older adults, aging, problem solving, Raven’s Matrices, matrix reasoning]