The most useful single fact about the Standard test comes from Matzen and colleagues, who analysed the relations in Raven’s original items and found two families that never appear together in one item. An item is either a transformation or a piece of logic. Deciding which, before anything else, halves the work.
Transformations
Something about the figure changes step by step along the row or the column: its shape, its shading, its orientation, its size or its number. In the course’s words these are rotation, mirror, movement, size, colour, shape and number. Set C is all transformation. When the values are distributed rather than stepped, each one appearing once per row, you are in Set D’s territory: still a transformation family, arranged rather than stepped.
Logic
Two cells combine into the third. What is in both stays, or what is in either stays, or what is in exactly one stays, or one is taken away from the other. The course calls the family combining. Set E is logic, and a few Set A fields are too, where the missing piece is the union or the difference of the texture’s components.
The first question to ask of any 3x3
- Do the cells in row one look like the same figure changing? Then it is a transformation: name what changes.
- Do the first two cells in row one look like parts that make the third? Then it is logic: name the operation.
- Never both. If your reading needs one rule of each kind, one of them is wrong.
Source: Matzen et al. 2010, on the relation types in Raven’s original SPM, as summarised in the site’s taxonomy reference (read 2026-09-21). Course names per the 2026-09-21 vocabulary ruling. 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.