The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7.5 sweep (Focus@7) using the Basic Reading measure.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Reading ability |
| Measures: | General verbal information |
| Lexical knowledge | |
| Reading decoding | |
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallised Intelligence) |
| Grw (Reading/Writing) | |
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; pointing/answers orally |
| Procedure: | Comprised of the basic reading subtest of the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensions (WORD; Wechsler, 1993). First, the child was shown a picture, with four words underneath. They were asked to point to the word that had the same beginning or ending sound as the picture. Second, they were shown a series of three pictures, each with four words beneath, and were asked to select the word that correctly matched the picture. Third, the child was asked to read aloud a list of 48 unconnected words that increased in difficulty. The reading task was stopped if the child made 6 consecutive errors. A total score was computed reflecting the number of items answered correctly. |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | Total number of correct items (0 - 50) |
| Item-level variable(s): | f7ws077 - f7ws083 |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | f7ws076, f7ws076a |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 8,055 | |
| Range = 0 - 52 | |
| Mean = 28.22 | |
| SD = 9.34 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Age of participants: | Mean = 90.5 months, SD = 3.83, Range = 82 - 113 |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None |
| Source: | Wechsler, D. (1993). Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensions. London: The Psychological Corporation. |
| Technical resources: | None. |
| Reference examples: | Gathercole, S. E., Tiffany, C., Briscoe, J., Thorn, A., & ALSPAC team. (2005). Developmental consequences of poor phonological short-term memory function in childhood: A longitudinal study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46(6), 598-611. |
| Meadows, S., Herrick, D., Feiler, A., & ALSPAC Study Team. (2007). Improvement in national test reading scores at Key Stage 1; grade inflation or better achievement? British Educational Research Journal, 33(1), 47-59. |
For the named items in the table above, links are provided to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery. Where a variable range is provided, full variable lists can be accessed through the ‘Variable Groups’ tab on the linked Discovery page.
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in ALSPAC
- Overview of childhood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.