The Suitability of School Feeling and Thought Scale in Appraising Intellectual Ability

The objective of the study was to determine the suitability and validity of the School Feeling and Thought Scale in appraising intellectual ability of Malay school children. Subjects were 100 pupils, 53 boys and 47 girls from a primary school in a small town in Negeri Sembilan, a state in Malaysia. Three instruments were administered to the subjects, namely, Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven, 1965), the SFT Scale (Clifford, 1988), and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (Wechsler, 1974). The results indicated that the translated version of the SFT had a modest internal consistency (alpha = 0.75) and a high test-retest reliability. The SFT scores did not show any significant difference between gender. The three subtests of the SFT showed from moderate to high and significant correlations with each other indicating that the items in the three subtests were of similar construct. The SFT also showed positive and significant correlations with intelligence tests ranging from 0.56 to 0.70 (p<.001). The SFT was also able to discriminate those with high intellectual ability from those with low intellectual ability . The implications of the findings were discussed in terms of the suitability of the SFT in appraising intellectual ability of the local school children.