NSHD - Age 8 - Word Reading

The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 8 sweep using the Word Reading measure.

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

Year of data collection:	1954
Domain:	Verbal (reading)
Measures:	Reading decoding
CHC:	Grw (Reading/Writing)
CLOSER Source:	Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: NSHD 1954 (Age 8) (opens in a new tab)
Administration method:	Teacher/psychologist/trained individual; face to face; read aloud
Procedure:	Participants were presented with a list of 50 words. They were instructed to read words aloud, one by one, working down the list. The interviewer recorded the number of correct responses (only correct if usual pronunciation was used). If a child changed their initial answer to a correct answer, the item was marked as correct. If the child changed their initial answer to a wrong answer, the item was marked incorrect. Interviewers were instructed not to give any indication as to whether answers were right or wrong. In case of a delay, prompts such as “Have a try” were used. The overall testing session at age 8 lasted under 2 hours.
Link to questionnaire:	https://skylark.ucl.ac.uk/NSHD/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=questionnaires:1954_sm_nf2.pdf (opens in new tab)
Scoring:	One point for each correct answer (0 – 50)
Item-level variable(s):	Not currently available
Total score/derived variable(s):	R8R, R8R54, R854, R8N
Descriptives:	Raw score	Normalised score
	N = 4,259	N = 4,259
	Range = 0 – 49	Range = 64 – 158
	Mean = 17.02	Mean = 102.00
	SD = 10.28	SD = 15.33
	(click image to enlarge)	(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants:	8 years 6 months
Other sweep and/or cohort:	NSHD – Age 11 – Word Reading
	MCS – Age 7 – BAS II Word Reading
	BCS70 – Child of CM (Multi-Age) – BAS Word Reading
Source:	Pigeon DA. Tests used in the 1954 and 1957 surveys. In: Douglas JWB, ed. The home and the school. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964. (Appendix 1.)
Technical resources:	None
Example articles:	Richards, M., Hardy, R., Kuh, D., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2001). Birth weight and cognitive function in the British 1946 birth cohort: longitudinal population based study. BMJ, 322(7280), 199-203.
	Kuh, D., Richards, M., Hardy, R., Butterworth, S., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2004). Childhood cognitive ability and deaths up until middle age: a post-war birth cohort study. International Journal of Epidemiology, 33(2), 408-413.