The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 8 sweep using the Reading Comprehension measure.
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/psychologist/trained individual; 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. “Come with me to the shops to buy some (fire, water, stone, sweets, motors)”. The overall testing session at age 8 lasted under 2 hours. | |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://skylark.ucl.ac.uk/NSHD/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=questionnaires:1954_sm_nf2.pdf (opens in new tab) | |
| Scoring: | One point awarded per correct answer (0 - 35) | |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | SC8R, SC8R54, SC854, SC8N | |
| Descriptives: | Raw score | Normalised score |
| N = 4,259 | N = 4,259 | |
| Range = 0 - 34 | Range = 69 - 153 | |
| Mean = 14.20 | Mean = 102.16 |
|
| SD = 7.78 | SD = 15.16 |
|
(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants: | 8 years 6 months | |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | NCDS – Age 11 – Reading Comprehension Test | |
| NCDS – Age 16 – Reading Comprehension Test | ||
| NSHD – Age 15 – The Watts-Vernon Reading Test | ||
| NSHD – Age 26 – The Watts-Vernon Reading Test | ||
| Source: | Pigeon DA. Tests used in the 1954 and 1957 surveys. In: Douglas JWB, ed. The home and the school. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964. (Appendix 1.) | |
| Technical resources: | None | |
| Reference examples: | Richards, M., Hardy, R., Kuh, D., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2001). Birth weight and cognitive function in the British 1946 birth cohort: longitudinal population based study. BMJ, 322(7280), 199-203. | |
| Kuh, D., Richards, M., Hardy, R., Butterworth, S., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2004). Childhood cognitive ability and deaths up until middle age: a post-war birth cohort study. International Journal of Epidemiology, 33(2), 408-413. | ||
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’.