The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 15 sweep using the Watts-Vernon Reading Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
Domain: | Verbal (reading) | |
Measures: | Word comprehension/lexical knowledge | |
Reading comprehension | ||
Reading decoding | ||
CHC: | Gc (Crystallized Intelligence) | |
Grw (Reading/Writing) | ||
Administration method: | Teacher; face to face; pen and paper | |
Procedure: | Participants were presented with a list of 35 sentence, and were asked to underline the correct word (from 5 different options) to complete each sentence, e.g. "You can buy stamps at a post (station, house, shop, man, office)". The total time of administration was approximately 15 minutes (10 minutes working time). | |
Link to questionnaire: | https://skylark.ucl.ac.uk/NSHD/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=questionnaires:1961_sm_nf4.pdf (opens in new tab) | |
Scoring: | One mark for each correct sentence (0 - 35) | |
Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available | |
Total score/derived variable(s): | R15R, R15R61, R1561, R15N | |
Descriptives: | Raw score | Normalised score |
N = 4,018 | N = 4,015 | |
Range = 0 - 36 | Range = 55 - 138 | |
Mean = 24.47 | Mean = 102.24 | |
SD = 6.66 | SD = 15.12 | |
(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
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Age of participants (months): | Mean = 174.54, SD = 2.12, Range = 172 - 182 | |
Other sweep and/or cohort: | NSHD – Age 8 – Reading Comprehension | |
NSHD – Age 26 – The Watts-Vernon Reading Test | ||
NCDS – Age 11 – Reading Comprehension Test | ||
NCDS – Age 16 – Reading Comprehension Test | ||
Source: | Ministry of Education (1950). Reading Ability. London: HMSO | |
Technical resources: | Pigeon DA. Details of the fifteen years tests. In: Douglas JWB, Ross JM, Simpson HR, eds. All Our Future. London: Davies, 1968; Appendix 1. | |
Reference examples: | Richards, M., Shipley, B., Fuhrer, R., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2004). Cognitive ability in childhood and cognitive decline in mid-life: longitudinal birth cohort study. BMJ, 328(7439), 552. | |
Cooper, R., Richards, M., & Kuh, D. (2017). Childhood cognitive ability and age-related changes in physical capability from midlife: Findings from a British birth cohort study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 79(7), 785. |
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in NSHD
- 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’.