Construction of Test Measuring Mental Rotation Ability of Adolescent High School Students

Abstract

One important aspect of Visuospatial Reasoning is the ability to rotate an object mentally. Presently, one of the most popular and widely used test of Mental Rotation is the Redrawn version of Vandenberg & Kuse Mental Rotation test (VMRT) However, this test has often been criticised to be more difficult because of its complicated scoring system. Present study compared this standard test of mental rotation ability with a newly constructed test with less number of items and less complicated scoring system. We collected data from 147 adolescent school students (Mean age=13.10 years; SD=1.84) by administering both the tests consecutively. Findings showed that VMRT has very high difficulty index as compared to the newly constructed test. The latter also proved to be a more reliable and valid measure of mental rotation ability as compared to VMRT. Discussion focused on the relative advantage of the newly constructed test for assessing mental rotation ability.