Mirror drawing test is used to measure

Concept: Transfer of learning (also called transfer of training) is how skill, knowledge, or habit acquired doing one task or under one condition affects -- helps, hinders, or has no effect on -- performance of a second, related task or under a changed condition. Because this carryover is not directly visible, psychologists demonstrate and measure it experimentally by deliberately having a person practise a skill under one condition and then testing performance under a second, related condition, comparing it against a control.

Application: The mirror-drawing (mirror-tracing) test is a classic laboratory task built exactly for this before/after, condition-to-condition comparison: a subject traces a fixed shape (such as a star outline) under one condition -- for instance with one hand, or viewing it directly -- across several trials, and then repeats the same tracing task under a changed condition -- the other hand, or viewing it only via a mirror, which reverses the usual left-right visual-motor coordination. Errors and completion time are recorded under both conditions. To isolate how much of this is due to prior practice rather than the changed condition's own inherent difficulty, the practised subject's performance on this second condition is compared against a matched control group of comparable subjects who attempt only the second condition, without first practising the original condition. The difference between the practised group's second-condition performance and this untrained control group's performance -- not the raw score alone -- is what researchers attribute to skill carried over from the first condition. This control-referenced comparison is why the mirror-drawing/tracing task became a standard laboratory tool for studying transfer of learning specifically, rather than being used to gauge general single-condition acquisition speed in isolation, creative idea-generation, or personal liking for an activity, each of which is assessed with different, purpose-built instruments.

Cross-check: This matches the item's own syllabus placement -- it appears in the UPTET Paper-2 educational-psychology unit on experimental methods, where the mirror-drawing/tracing task is a textbook example used specifically to illustrate transfer of training between related conditions.