Aptitude:Comparison among Rural and Urban School Students

Aptitude is a condition or set of characteristics regarded as symptomatic of an individual's ability to acquire with training some usually specified knowledge, skill and set of responses. Aptitude tests in today's competitive world; it helps school students throughout their lives and has a really huge impact on their outlook towards life. This study is taken on school students to know their potential so that it helps them in choosing their career and to select the different streams for their future. Hence the study was undertaken with objectives to know the aptitude of urban and rural school students and to know the differences on aptitude dimensions. The samples were selected from two urban and two rural schools among which were 40 urban and 40 rural school students were randomly selected from 9th and 10th standards. The data was collected using differential aptitude testing developed by Bennett et al. (1993) on verbal reasoning, numerical ability, abstract reasoning, mechanical reasoning and scholastic aptitude. The results indicated that significant difference was observed between urban and rural school student. Among urban group most of the students belonged to high level of aptitude dimensions like verbal reasoning, numerical ability, abstract reasoning, mechanical reasoning and scholastic aptitude. There was significant difference between boys and girls with dimensions of aptitude among rural and urban school students.