ALSPAC - Age 13.5 - Tests Of Reading Efficiency/Fluency (TOWRE)

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 13 sweep (TeenFocus 2) using Tests Of Reading Efficiency/Fluency (TOWRE).

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

Years of data collection:	2005-2006
Domain:	Reading ability
Measures:	Verbal expression
	Lexical knowledge
	Pronunciation
	Sight word efficiency
	Decoding efficiency
	Reading speed
CHC:	Gc (Crystallised Intelligence)
	Grw (Reading/Writing)
CLOSER Source:	Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Adolescence (13 years – 18 years 11 months) (opens in a new tab)
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):	fg5700 – fg5925 Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Teen Focus 2 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Descriptives:	Real word finished on	Non-word finished on
	N = 5,535	N = 5,522
	Range = 18- 104	Range = 4 – 63
	Mean = 82.54	Mean = 50.80
	SD = 10.35	SD = 9.41
	(click image to enlarge)	(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):	Mean (months) = 166.02, SD = 2.49, Range = 150 – 182
Other sweep and/or cohort:	ALSPAC – Age 12.5 – 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.
Example articles:	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.