NCDS – Age 7 – Copying Designs Test

The 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7 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:	1965
Domain:	Visual spatial
Measures:	Visual motor co-ordination (ability to reproduce shapes and hold a pencil)
CHC:	Gv (Visual Processing)
CLOSER Source:	Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: NCDS Age 7 Survey (1965) (opens in a new tab)
Administrative method:	Teacher at school; 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 the 6 drawings, one at a time.
	Duration: It was expected 60 – 90 minutes would be required for all 4 tests at age 7.
Link to questionnaire:	No direct link to pdf. Information can be found in the file ‘ncds1_1965_questionnaires_and_codebook.pdf’ which accompanies data download from the UK Data Service website.
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 was 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):	N457 Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: NCDS1 Tests (1965) Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Age of participant (months):	Mean = 85.11, SD = 1.56, Range = 82 – 93
Descriptives:	Raw score
	N = 14,867
	Range = 0 – 12
	Mean = 7.01
	SD = 2.00
	(click image to enlarge)
Other sweep and/or cohort:	NCDS – Age 11 – 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.
	Davie, R., Butler, N. R., & Goldstein, H. (1972). From Birth to Seven. London: Longman Group Limited
Technical resources:	Shepherd, P., Measures of ability at ages 7 to 16. National Child Development Study User Guide, 2012.
Example articles:	Sheridan, M. D. (1973). Children of seven years with marked speech defects. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 8(1), 9-16.
	Ross, A., Schoon, I., Martin, P., & Sacker, A. (2009). Family and nonfamily role configurations in two British cohorts. Journal of Marriage and Family, 71(1), 1-14.