NSHD – Age 15 – The Watts-Vernon Reading Test
The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 15 sweep using the Watts-Vernon Reading Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
In this section
| Year of data collection: | 1961 | |
| Domain: | Verbal (reading) | |
| Measures: | Word comprehension/lexical knowledge | |
| Reading comprehension | ||
| Reading decoding | ||
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallized Intelligence) | |
| Grw (Reading/Writing) | ||
| CLOSER Source: | Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: NSHD 1961 (Age 15) (opens in a new tab) | |
| Administration method: | Teacher; face to face; pen and paper | |
| Procedure: | Participants were presented with a list of 35 sentence, and were asked to underline the correct word (from 5 different options) to complete each sentence, e.g. “You can buy stamps at a post (station, house, shop, man, office)”. The total time of administration was approximately 15 minutes (10 minutes working time). | |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://skylark.ucl.ac.uk/NSHD/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=questionnaires:1961_sm_nf4.pdf (opens in new tab) | |
| Scoring: | One mark for each correct sentence (0 – 35) | |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | R15R, R15R61, R1561, R15N | |
| Descriptives: | Raw score | Normalised score |
| N = 4,018 | N = 4,015 | |
| Range = 0 – 36 | Range = 55 – 138 | |
| Mean = 24.47 | Mean = 102.24 | |
| SD = 6.66 | SD = 15.12 | |
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(click image to enlarge) |
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| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 174.54, SD = 2.12, Range = 172 – 182 | |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | NSHD – Age 8 – Reading Comprehension | |
| NSHD – Age 26 – The Watts-Vernon Reading Test | ||
| NCDS – Age 11 – Reading Comprehension Test | ||
| NCDS – Age 16 – Reading Comprehension Test | ||
| Source: | Ministry of Education (1950). Reading Ability. London: HMSO | |
| Technical resources: | Pigeon DA. Details of the fifteen years tests. In: Douglas JWB, Ross JM, Simpson HR, eds. All Our Future. London: Davies, 1968; Appendix 1. | |
| Example articles: | Richards, M., Shipley, B., Fuhrer, R., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2004). Cognitive ability in childhood and cognitive decline in mid-life: longitudinal birth cohort study. BMJ, 328(7439), 552. | |
| Cooper, R., Richards, M., & Kuh, D. (2017). Childhood cognitive ability and age-related changes in physical capability from midlife: Findings from a British birth cohort study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 79(7), 785. | ||