The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 10 sweep using the Word Definition measure from the British Ability Scales (BAS).
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Year of data collection: | 1980 |
| Domain: | Verbal knowledge (acquired and expressive) |
| Measures: | Verbal ability: |
| Vocabulary knowledge | |
| Expressive language skills, including verbal fluency | |
| General knowledge | |
| Verbal conceptualisation | |
| Abstract thinking | |
| Retrieval of information from long-term memory | |
| Level of language stimulation | |
| (may depend on experience as well as education) | |
| Low scores may be generally attributable to: | |
| Poor verbal development | |
| Disadvantaged environmental circumstances | |
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallised intelligence) |
| CLOSER Source: | Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: BCS70 Age 10 Survey (1980) (opens in a new tab) |
| Administrative method: | In schools; pen and paper |
| Procedure: | The teacher was presented with a list of 37 words. Each word was orally presented to the child who was asked what the word meant. E.g. “SPORT”; “What does SPORT mean?”. The words increased in difficulty as the test progressed. |
| Items were scored as correct or incorrect according to whether or not the child expressed key concepts of the word’s meaning. The assessment was stopped after four successive incorrect or partially incorrect words. | |
| Duration: Total 30 minutes for 4 BAS tests | |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/British-ability-scales-annotated.pdf (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | 37 items, the child received 1 point for each correct answer |
| Item-level variable(s): | i3504 - i3540 |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | None |
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 121.88, SD = 2.67, Range = 117 - 139 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 11,526 | |
| Range = 0 - 32 | |
| Mean = 10.13 | |
| SD = 5.01 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
|
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | NSHD – Age 8 – Vocabulary (similar National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) task) |
| NSHD – Age 11 – Vocabulary (similar National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) task) | |
| ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – WISC-III Vocabulary | |
| Source: | Elliott, C. D., Murray, D. J., & Pearson, L. S. (1979). British Ability Scales, Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research. |
| Elliott, C., Murray, D., & Pearson, L. (1978). British Ability Scales. Windsor: National Foundation for Educational Research. | |
| Technical resources: | Parsons, S. (2014). Childhood cognition in the 1970 British Cohort Study, CLS Working Paper. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies. (Link opens in a new tab). |
| Example articles: | Bennett, K. E., & Haggard, M. P. (1999). Behaviour and cognitive outcomes from middle ear disease. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 80(1), 28-35. |
| Connelly, R., & Gayle, V. (2019). An investigation of social class inequalities in general cognitive ability in two British birth cohorts. The British Journal of Sociology, 70(1), 90-108. |
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measure in BCS70
- 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’.