The Coloured Progressive Matricesis the colour form of Raven’s test and the gentlest of the three. Pearson lists it for ages five to eleven, for older people, and for people with a learning difficulty or a language barrier: it needs no words, and its instructions can be given by gesture. It reuses the first two sets of the original 1938 Standard test, A and B, and puts a bridging set, Ab, between them, built to sit halfway in difficulty.
What an item is
A design with a piece missing, bottom right, and six pieces below it to choose from. Pearson’s own line is the only content statement on any Raven’s page: examinees identify the missing element in a series of figural patterns, and the items increase in complexity and require stronger encoding and analysis skills. Most items sit on a coloured background; the last few items of Set B are printed in black on white, as a bridge to the Standard test.
The three sets
- Set A completes a continuous pattern: a large textured field with a cut-out, where the piece must carry the texture across the gap.
- Set Ab asks for the figure that belongs with the others in the frame: identity, and the part that completes a related whole.
- Set B moves to analogies: a pair that changes one way, and a second pair to finish the same way.
That set-by-set reading is the circulating one, and it matches the survey literature’s finding that each Raven’s set has a distinct theme. Raven’s own manual wording could not be read for this course, so it is recorded as third-party.
Sources: Pearson Clinical UK, CPM product page; Yang et al. 2023 (RPM survey) on the sets’ origin and the colour; testhq and testingmom on the set themes and the six options, third-party. Read 2026-09-21. This is independent practice material. It is not a Pearson product and uses none of Raven's items. Figures come from Pearson's own pages and the primary literature; where only third parties state a figure, the text says so.