ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) Arithmetic

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.