Approbation of the Test of General Knowledge in Russia

Abstract

The article presents the results of approbation on the Russian sample of the general knowledge test developed in UK. The test estimates general knowledge of an individual in 18 domains: History of Science; Politics; Sport; History; Classical Music; Art; Literature; General Science; Geography; Cookery; Medicine; Games; Discovery and Exploration; Biology; Film; Fashion; Finance; Popular Music. The obtained data was compared with the UK data. The results show that the Russian participants have higher competence in most domains. Also, it was shown that differences in difficulty of questions in various domains are stable: there is a significant correlation between measures of difficulty of the test items for the 18 domains in the Russian and the British data. One possible explanation of this result relies on the hypothesis of differences in representations in the system of human knowledge. The obtained data have enabled us to exclude from the test too easy and too difficult (with kurtosis more than 30) items for the Russian participants. The version of the test after this exclusion is highly reliable (the Cronbach’s alpha is 0.956). The test items, included in this version, were used for the comparison of the factor structures of general knowledge revealed in the British and the present studies. These factor structures were rather similar. This confirms that general knowledge as a cognitive ability can be partitioned into more narrow abilities.