The Group Embedded Figures Test: The Learning Effect Reexamined

Abstract

The Group Embedded Figures Test was administered to 96 undergraduate business administration students at a Canadian university. Analysis suggests that the learning effect may not be independent of the order in which the two main parts of the test are completed and any learning effect may be confounded by the non-comparable difficulty of the two main parts.

Context Effects on Test Performance

“…However, these effects were only found in analysis of the single subtest; they caused no main effects and the effect sizes were rather small. Learning effects were also found by varying two test parts of a test measuring field dependence-independence with figural item material (Kelleher, McRae, & Young, 1990); but the effects occurred only when the test began with the more difficult part. Test order effects were found in a randomized test sequence of tests that measured conceptual and procedural knowledge about decimal fractions, which were interpreted as a lack of validity of these tests (Schneider & Stern, 2010).…”