NCDS – Age 11 – Copying Designs Test

The 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 11 sweep using the Copying Designs Test.

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

Year of data collection:	1969
Domain:	Visual spatial
Measures:	Visual motor co-ordination
	Ability to reproduce shapes
CHC:	Gv (Visual Processing)
CLOSER Source:	Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: NCDS Age 11 Survey 1969 (opens in a new tab)
Administrative method:	Teacher at school; individually face to face; pen and paper
Procedure:	Six designs were presented: a circle, square, triangle, diamond, cross and star. The child was given a booklet, and asked to copy 6 drawings, one at a time.
Link to questionnaire:	https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/NCDS2-Guide-to-the-Dataset.pdf (opens in new tab)
Scoring:	Score 0 – 12. Each drawing is scored 0 or 1. As not all children completed two copies a score of 1 was given if at least one copy is good. Total score is the sum of the score for the individual drawings. Zero was awarded when a child attempted to copy at least one design, but all attempts were judged to be poor copies.
Item-level variable(s):	Not currently available
Total score/derived variable(s):	n929
Age of participant (months):	Mean = 134.25, SD = 1.70, Range = 130 – 152
Descriptives:	Raw score
	N = 14,101
	Range = 0 – 12
	Mean = 8.34
	SD = 1.50
	(click image to enlarge)
Other sweep and/or cohort:	NCDS – Age 7 – Copying Designs Test
	BCS70 – Age 5 – Copying Designs Test (less stringent scoring; 8 designs)
	BCS70 – Child of CM (Multi-Age) – Copying Designs Test (8 designs; currently no data available)
Source:	Pringle, M. K., Butler, N., & Davie, R. (1966). 11,000 Seven Year Olds. Longman, in association with National Children’s Bureau.
Technical resources:	Shepherd, P. Measures of ability at ages 7 to 16. National Child Development Study User Guide, 2012.
Example articles:	Jenkins, A., Vignoles, A., Wolf, A., & Galindo-Rueda, F. (2003). The determinants and labour market effects of lifelong learning. Applied Economics, 35(16), 1711-1721.
	Lynn, R., & Kanazawa, S. (2011). A longitudinal study of sex differences in intelligence at ages 7, 11 and 16 years. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(3), 321-324.