BCS70 – Age 10 – Spelling Dictation Task (SDT)

The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 10 sweep using the Spelling Dictation Task (SDT).

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

Year of data collection:	1980
Domain:	Verbal (spelling)
Measures:	Dictation task measuring spelling and phonetic decoding
CHC:	Gc (Crystallised ability)
	Ga (Auditory processing)
	Grw (Reading/Writing)
CLOSER Source:	Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: BCS70 Age 10 Survey (1980) (opens in a new tab)
Administrative method:	In schools; pen and paper
Procedure:	A paragraph was dictated to the child including both real and made-up words. A sentence could be repeated once and an imaginary word in the middle of the passage could be repeated twice.
Link to questionnaire:	No direct link to questionnaire. Instructions, including the dictated paragraph, can be found in file ‘a3723udb.pdf’ (page 26) accompanying data download from UK Data Service (link opens in a new tab). More information about the procedure can be found in the “Technical Resources” document below.
Scoring:	Maximum score of 50 where the child was awarded a point for each correct spelling of a real word and a score of 1 for each syllable of the made up words.
Item-level variable(s):	I3815 – I3864
Total score/derived variable(s):	None
Age of participants (months):	Mean = 121.88, SD = 2.67, Range = 117 – 139
Descriptives:	Raw score
	N = 12,489
	Range = 0 – 50
	Mean = 34.96
	SD = 10.73
	(click image to enlarge)
Other sweep and/or cohort:	None
Source:	Unknown
Technical resources:	Parsons, S. (2014). Childhood cognition in the 1970 British Cohort Study, CLS Working Paper. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies.
Example articles:	Miles, T. R., Wheeler, T. J., & Haslum, M. N. (2003). The existence of dyslexia without severe literacy problems. Annals of Dyslexia, 53(1), 340-354.

For the named items in the table above, links are provided (where applicable) 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.