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ALSPAC – Age 7.5 – Basic Reading

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7.5 sweep (Focus@7) using the Basic Reading measure.

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

 

In this section

ALSPAC Age 7.5 Basic Reading

Years of data collection: 1998-2000
Domain: Reading ability
Measures: General verbal information
Lexical knowledge
Reading decoding
CHC: Gc (Crystallised Intelligence)
Grw (Reading/Writing)
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; pointing/answers orally
Procedure: Comprised of the basic reading subtest of the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensions (WORD; Wechsler, 1993). First, the child was shown a picture, with four words underneath. They were asked to point to the word that had the same beginning or ending sound as the picture. Second, they were shown a series of three pictures, each with four words beneath, and were asked to select the word that correctly matched the picture. Third, the child was asked to read aloud a list of 48 unconnected words that increased in difficulty. The reading task was stopped if the child made 6 consecutive errors. A total score was computed reflecting the number of items answered correctly.
Link to questionnaire: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring: Total number of correct items (0 – 50)
Item-level variable(s): f7ws077f7ws083
Total score/derived variable(s): f7ws076
f7ws076a
Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 7 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Descriptives: N = 8,055
Range = 0 – 52
Mean = 28.22
SD = 9.34
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months): Mean = 90.5 months, SD = 3.83, Range = 82 – 113
Other sweep and/or cohort: None
Source: Wechsler, D. (1993). Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensions. London: The Psychological Corporation.
Technical resources: None.
Example articles: Gathercole, S. E., Tiffany, C., Briscoe, J., Thorn, A., & ALSPAC team. (2005). Developmental consequences of poor phonological short-term memory function in childhood: A longitudinal study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46(6), 598-611.
Meadows, S., Herrick, D., Feiler, A., & ALSPAC Study Team. (2007). Improvement in national test reading scores at Key Stage 1; grade inflation or better achievement? British Educational Research Journal, 33(1), 47-59.

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.