The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 11 sweep (Focus 11+ Clinic) using a measure of Higher Conceptual Reasoning (Bike Drawing Task).
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | General ability (perceptual) |
| Measures: | Higher conceptual reasoning |
| Mechanical reasoning | |
| Visuographing functioning | |
| CHC: | General ability (G) |
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; pen and paper |
| Procedure: | The child was asked to draw a bicycle within a box on a piece of A4 paper. They were given a maximum of 3 minutes to complete the task, and were prompted with 30 seconds remaining. They were scored on whether any of 12 basic items necessary for a bike to function were present in the drawing (e.g. wheels, handlebars). A further 10 more detailed items were also scored (e.g. basket, bell), as were 3 possible background aspects of the picture (road, landscape, sky). |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | In the early stages, each criterion was scored present/absent. However, additional coding was required to note whether an item was functional (e.g. pedals attached to frame), and scoring was later amended to Yes, functional; Yes, not functional and No. There is a summary variable that indicates which coding scheme was used. According to the latest ALSPAC documentation, early data is currently being recoded to the new format. |
| Item-level variable(s): | febd001 - febd101 |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | febd020a - febd071 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 4,296 | |
| Range = 0 - 16 | |
| Mean = 6.08 | |
| SD = 2.70 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Age of participants: | Mean (months) = 140.97, SD = 2.86, Range = 125 - 163 |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None |
| Source: | Designed for study by Professor Dieter Wolke. Based on similar tasks that have been used for decades, e.g. Piaget, J. (1930). |
| Technical resources: | None |
| Reference examples: | Unknown |
For the named items in the table above, links are provided to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery. Where a variable range is provided, full variable lists can be accessed through the ‘Variable Groups’ tab on the linked Discovery page.
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in ALSPAC
- 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’.