The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 12.5 sweep (TeenFocus 1) using Tests Of Reading Efficiency/Fluency (TOWRE).
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Reading ability | |
| Measures: | Verbal expression | |
| Lexical knowledge | ||
| Pronunciation | ||
| Sight word efficiency | ||
| Decoding efficiency | ||
| Reading speed | ||
| CHC: | Crystallised Intelligence (Gc) | |
| Grw (Reading/Writing) | ||
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; oral answers | |
| Procedure: | The child was presented with two lists, one consisting of real words (e.g. she, strong, crowd) and the other nonwords (e.g. ip, nup, poth). The child was asked to read the words aloud as quickly as possible (max time limit of 45 seconds per list). | |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) | |
| Scoring: | Score based on number of correct words within timeframe. | |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not readily available. | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | ff2430 - ff2525 | |
| Descriptives: | Real words reached | Non-words reached |
| N = 2,084 | N = 2,081 | |
| Range = 19 - 104 | Range = 2 - 63 | |
| Mean = 77.38 | Mean = 49.07 | |
| SD = 10.60 | SD = 9.63 | |
(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants: | Mean (months) = 153.73, SD = 2.77, Range = 136 - 171 | |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | ALSPAC – Age 13 – Tests Of Reading Efficiency/Fluency (TOWRE) | |
| Source: | Torgesen, J. K., Rashotte, C. A., & Wagner, R. K. (1999). TOWRE: Test of word reading efficiency. Austin, TX: Pro-ed. | |
| Technical resources: | None | |
| Reference examples: | Bryant, P., Nunes, T., & Barros, R. (2014). The connection between children's knowledge and use of grapho?phonic and morphemic units in written text and their learning at school. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 84(2), 211-225. | |
| Davis, O. S., Band, G., Pirinen, M., Haworth, C. M., Meaburn, E. L., Kovas, Y., ... & Curtis, C. J. (2014). The correlation between reading and mathematics ability at age twelve has a substantial genetic component. Nature Communications, 5, 4204. | ||
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’.