“The International Cognitive Ability Resource: Development and Initial Validation of a Public-Domain Measure”, 2014-03-01 (; backlinks; similar):
Structural analyses of the ICAR items demonstrated high general factor saturation.
Primary factor loadings were consistent across items of each type.
Corrected correlations with the Shipley-2 were above 0.8.
Corrected correlations with self-reported achievement test scores were about 0.45.
Group discriminative validity by college major was high (~0.8) for the SAT and GRE.
For all of its versatility and sophistication, the extant toolkit of cognitive ability measures lacks a public domain method for large-scale, remote data collection. While the lack of copyright protection for such a measure poses a theoretical threat to test validity, the effective magnitude of this threat is unknown and can be offset by the use of modern test-development techniques. To the extent that validity can be maintained, the benefits of a public-domain resource are considerable for researchers, including: cost savings; greater control over test content; and the potential for more nuanced understanding of the correlational structure between constructs.
The International Cognitive Ability Resource was developed to evaluate the prospects for such a public-domain measure and the psychometric properties of the first 4 item types were evaluated based on administrations to both an offline university sample and a large online sample. Concurrent and discriminative validity analyses suggest that the public-domain status of these item types did not compromise their validity despite administration to 97,000 participants.
Further development and validation of extant and additional item types are recommended.
[Keywords: cognitive ability, intelligence, online assessment, psychometric validation, public-domain measures]