Wordsum is a 10-item
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...
test
Test(s), testing, or TEST may refer to:
* Test (assessment), an educational assessment intended to measure the respondents' knowledge or other abilities
Arts and entertainment
* ''Test'' (2013 film), an American film
* ''Test'' (2014 film), ...
that has been included as an item on the
General Social Survey
The General Social Survey (GSS) is a sociological survey created and regularly collected since 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It is funded by the National Science Foundation. The GSS collects informati ...
(GSS) in most survey years since 1974. Each of the test's items ranges in difficulty from very easy to very difficult. It is widely used in research in the
social
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives from ...
and
behavioral sciences
Behavioral sciences explore the cognitive processes within organisms and the behavioral interactions between organisms in the natural world. It involves the systematic analysis and investigation of human and animal behavior through naturalistic o ...
. It is taken by about 1,000 people in each year in which it is included as part of the GSS. Its administration involves showing respondents a card containing 10 words, and then asking them to find the synonym for each of them out of a set of five choices. Although most researchers have implicitly assumed that each item on the test deserves equal weight, its validity can be improved by considering the variance for each word separately.
References
{{Vocab-stub
Intelligence tests