The 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 11 sweep using the Copying Designs Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Visual spatial |
| Measures: | Visual motor co-ordination |
| Ability to reproduce shapes | |
| CHC: | Gv (Visual Processing) |
| Administrative method: | Teacher at school; individually face to face; pen and paper |
| Procedure: | Six designs were presented: a circle, square, triangle, diamond, cross and star. The child was given a booklet, and asked to copy 6 drawings, one at a time. |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/NCDS2-Guide-to-the-Dataset.pdf (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | Score 0 - 12. Each drawing is scored 0 or 1. As not all children completed two copies a score of 1 was given if at least one copy is good. Total score is 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): | Not currently available |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | n929 |
| Age of participant (months): | Mean = 134.25, SD = 1.70, Range = 130 - 152 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 14,101 | |
| Range = 0 - 12 | |
| Mean = 8.34 | |
| SD = 1.50 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Other sweep and/or cohort: | NCDS – Age 7 – Copying Designs Test |
| BCS70 – Age 5 – Copying Designs Test (less stringent scoring; 8 designs) | |
| BCS70 – Child of CM (Multi-Age) – Copying Designs Test (8 designs; currently no data available) | |
| Source: | Pringle, M. K., Butler, N., & Davie, R. (1966). 11,000 Seven Year Olds. Longman, in association with National Children's Bureau. |
| Technical resources: | Shepherd, P. Measures of ability at ages 7 to 16. National Child Development Study User Guide, 2012. |
| Reference examples: | Jenkins, A., Vignoles, A., Wolf, A., & Galindo-Rueda, F. (2003). The determinants and labour market effects of lifelong learning. Applied Economics, 35(16), 1711-1721. |
| Lynn, R., & Kanazawa, S. (2011). A longitudinal study of sex differences in intelligence at ages 7, 11 and 16 years. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(3), 321-324. |
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in NCDS
- 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’.