International Cognitive Ability Resource

The International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR)

ICAR, a public-domain and opensource tool, is to provide a large and dynamic bank of cognitive ability measures for use in a wide variety of applications. By encouraging the use, revision and ongoing development of these measures among qualified research groups around the world, the ICAR will further understanding about the holistic structure of cognitive abilities as well as the nature of associations between cognitive ability constructs and other variables. ICAR will build heavily on automatic item generation techniques, which yield items with predictable psychometric qualities. The item generators developed for the ICAR will be distributed as functions in psychometrically-informed, easily implemented, open-source software. In addition, suitable statistical methodology will be developed and subprojects will use ICAR items to explore specific research questions. The impact of this international collaboration will be the creation of a platform for more standardized assessment and more rapid scientific progress among the disciplines and research groups around the world which use cognitive ability measures to diagnose impairments, evaluate the correlates of various abilities and predict important life outcomes.

About us

Information for ICAR users

You need to register online and fill in the registration form to gain access.

Item types

Sample tests

Citing ICAR scales

If not specified by authors of specific item types, you are encouraged to acknowledge the ICAR project by citing our website: http://icar-project.com/.

Information for ICAR collaborators

• If you have thoughts, ideas or hypotheses about the ways that existing items could be improved, we encourage you to test them and share the results of your efforts with the larger community.
• If you have items which you would like to contribute, please contact us so that we can share this information with other researchers (your authorship would, of course, be maintained). For the foreseeable future, we do not intend to set forth formal procedures for including new item types with the exception that new items must have been validated in some generalizable context.