BCS70 – Age 10 – British Ability Scales (BAS): Recall of Digits

The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 10 sweep using the Recall of Digits measure from the British Ability Scales (BAS).

Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.

Year of data collection:	1980
Domain:	Short-term auditory memory
Measures:	Short term auditory sequential recall: Short-term auditory memory Facility in verbal expression Concentration and attention
	Low scores: Use of inappropriate strategies for storage or retrieval of numbers
CHC:	Gsm (working memory)
CLOSER Source:	Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: BCS70 Age 10 Survey (1980) (opens in a new tab)
Administrative method:	In school, administered by teacher
Procedure:	The teacher was presented with 34 items. For each item the teacher read out digits and asked the child to repeat them. The exercise increased in difficulty from remembering and repeating two digits (e.g. 5, 4) to three digits (e.g. 5, 6, 4) and then up to eight digits (e.g. 3, 8, 8, 7, 8, 4, 4, 6). If the child asked for a repeat of the numbers, the teacher repeated the series of numbers but the subsequent answer was scored as incorrect. The test was stopped after four consecutive incorrect responses. For more details, see “Technical Resources” below.
	Duration: Total 30 minutes for 4 BAS tests
Link to questionnaire:	https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/British-ability-scales-annotated.pdf (opens in new tab)
Scoring:	34 items, 1 point for each correct recall
Item-level variable(s):	i3541 – i3574
Total score/derived variable(s):	None
Age of participants (months):	Mean = 121.88, SD = 2.67, Range = 117 – 139
Descriptives:	Raw score
	N = 11,512
	Range = 1 – 34
	Mean = 22.40
	SD = 4.28
	(click image to enlarge)
Other sweep and/or cohort:	NCDS – Child of CM (Multi-Age) – WISC-R Digit Span Subscale
	ALSPAC – Age 61 months – Short-Term Memory (Digit Span Test)
Source:	Elliott, C. D., Murray, D. J. & Pearson, L. S. (1979). British Ability Scales, Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research.
	Elliott, C., Murray, D., & Pearson, L. (1978). British Ability Scales. Windsor: National Foundation for Educational Research.
Technical resources:	Parsons, S. (2014). Childhood cognition in the 1970 British Cohort Study, CLS Working Paper. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies. (Link opens in a new tab).
Example articles:	Montgomery, S. M., Ehlin, A., & Sacker, A. (2006). Pre-pubertal growth and cognitive function. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 91(1), 61-62.
	Gale, C. R., Hatch, S. L., Batty, G. D., & Deary, I. J. (2009). Intelligence in childhood and risk of psychological distress in adulthood: the 1958 National Child Development Survey and the 1970 British Cohort Study. Intelligence, 37(6), 592-599.