The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 5 sweep using the Copying Designs Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Year of data collection: | 1975 |
| Domain: | Visual spatial |
| Measures: | Visual motor co-ordination. Ability to reproduce shapes. |
| CHC: | Gv (Visual processing) |
| CLOSER Source: | Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: BCS70 Age 5 Survey (1975) (opens in a new tab) |
| Administrative method: | Health visitor at home; drawing |
| Procedure: | The child was given a booklet, and asked to copy 8 drawings, one at a time twice on two consecutive pages of booklet. |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BCS70_age5_test_booklet.pdf (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | Score 0 -8. Each drawing was scored 0 or 1. As not all children completed two copies a score of 1 was given if at least one copy was good. Total score was the sum of the score for the individual drawings. Zero was awarded when a child attempted to copy at least one design but all attempts were judged to be poor copies. |
| Item-level variable(s): | f004 - f019 |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | f119 (Copying Designs Score; raw total) |
| f122 (Copying Designs Score; standardised)* | |
| *variable may have been updated, please check carefully | |
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 61.78, SD = 1.33, Range = 60 - 77 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 13,028 | |
| Range = 0 - 8 | |
| Mean = 4.73 | |
| SD = 1.98 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Other sweep and/or cohort: | BCS70 – Child of CM (Multi-Age) – Copying Designs Test (no data available) |
| NCDS – Age 7 – Copying Designs Test (6 designs) | |
| NCDS – Age 11 – Copying Designs Test (6 designs) | |
| Source: | Used in previous studies (Davie, et al., 1972; Rutter et al., 1970) |
| Rutter, M., Tizard, J., & Whitmore, K. (1970). Education, Health and Behaviour. London: Longman. | |
| Davie, R., Butler, N.R., & Goldstein, H. (1972). From Birth to Seven. A report of the National Child Development Study. London: Longman. | |
| Technical resources: | Parsons, S. (2014). Childhood cognition in the 1970 British Cohort Study, CLS Working Paper. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies. |
| Golding, J. (1975). The 1970 Birth Cohort 5-Year Follow-up: Guide to the Dataset. Bristol: University of Bristol Institute of Child Health. | |
| Example articles: | Blanden, J., Gregg, P., & Macmillan, L. (2006). Accounting for intergenerational income persistence: non-cognitive skills, ability and education. CEEDP (73). Centre for the Economics of Education, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. |
| White, J., & Batty, G.D. (2012). Intelligence across childhood in relation to illegal drug use in adulthood: 1970 British Cohort Study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 66(9), 767-774. |
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’.