The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 8.5 sweep (Focus@8) using the Arithmetic measure from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III).
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Years of data collection: | 1999-2001 | |
| Domain: | Arithmetic | |
| Measures: | Numeric reasoning | |
| Sequential processing | ||
| CHC: | Quantitative Knowledge (Gq) | |
| CLOSER Source: | Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Childhood (5 years to 12 years 11 months) (opens in a new tab) | |
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; pen and paper/oral answers | |
| Procedure: | The test contains 24 items. For items 1-5, the child responds orally to questions posed by the examiner that are related to picture stimuli. For items 6-18 the child solves problems that are read aloud by the examiner. For items 19-24 the child reads aloud problems that are written in a stimulus book, then proceeds to solve them. | |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) | |
| Scoring: | Raw scores were converted into scale scores using tables provided in the WISC manual (M = 10, SD = 3). | |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not readily available | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | f8ws022 – f8ws052 Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 8 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab) |
|
| Descriptives: | Raw score | Scaled score |
| N = 7,332 | N = 7,393 | |
| Range = 0 - 28 | Range = 0 - 19 | |
| Mean = 14.77 | Mean = 10.45 | |
| SD = 3.45 | SD = 4.11 | |
(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 103.82 months, SD = 3.92, Range = 89 - 127 | |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | ALSPAC – Age 4 – WPPSI-RUK Arithmetic | |
| Source: | Wechsler, D. (1991). WISC-III: Wechsler intelligence scale for children: Manual. Psychological Corporation. | |
| Technical resources: | Kaufman, A. S., & Lichtenberger, E. O. (2000). Essentials of WISC-III and WPPSI-R assessment. John Wiley & Sons Inc. | |
| Example articles: | Northstone, K., Joinson, C., Emmett, P., Ness, A., & Paus, T. (2012). Are dietary patterns in childhood associated with IQ at 8 years of age? A population-based cohort study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 66(7), 624-628. | |
| Bornstein, M. H., Hahn, C. S., & Wolke, D. (2013). Systems and cascades in cognitive development and academic achievement. Child Development, 84(1), 154-162. | ||
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’.