Speed of execution in aptitude tests as an indicator of cognitive skills: Stability and predictive value

The relationship between proficiency level and speed of execution in psychometric tests remains ambiguous due to deficiencies in the measurements used in the past. This article presents two studies: one on the stability and the other on the predictive contribution of a particular indication of speed of execution. The latter, called a time score (ST), is based on response time to the easy items of five of the nine tests in the battery of computerized aptitude tests for children (TAI-E). The first study deals with the stability of the proposed speed measurements. The second study examines the correlations between STs and various indications of cognitive skills. The test-retest correlations observed vary between 0.45 and 0.82 and all are significant; moreover, the time scores from the Vocabulary, Seriations, Arithmetic and Knowledge sub-tests significantly correlate with the academic results in French an Mathematics as well as with all scores from the TAI-E and WISC-III. And lastly, the time scores examined explain nearly one-quarter of the variance of these same performance criteria. These results provide indications of the possibility of a new contribution to the measurement of cognitive skills.