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NCDS – Age 11 – Mathematics Test

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

Details on this measure (devised by the National Foundation for Educational Research) and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.


Year of data collection:1969
Domain:Arithmetic
Measures:Arithmetic
CHC:Gq (Quantitative Knowledge)
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:The test consisted of 40 items. The test included, number skills, fractions, measures and geometry. Most questions were calculated directly, with a few involving multiple-choice answers.
Link to questionnaire:https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/NCDS2-Guide-to-the-Dataset.pdf (opens in new tab)
Scoring:One mark was awarded for each correct answer
Item-level variable(s):Not currently available
Total score/derived variable(s):n926
Age of participant (months):Mean = 134.25, SD = 1.70, Range = 130 - 152
Descriptives:Raw score
N = 14,126
Range = 0 - 40
Mean = 16.63
SD = 10.35
(click image to enlarge)
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Constructed by National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) specifically for use in the NCDS
Technical resources:Shepherd, P., Measures of ability at ages 7 to 16. National Child Development Study User Guide, 2012.
Example articles:Cherlin, A. J., Furstenberg, F. F., Chase-Lansdale, L., Kiernan, K. E., Robins, P. K., Morrison, D. R., & Teitler, J. O. (1991). Longitudinal studies of effects of divorce on children in Great Britain and the United States. Science, 252(5011), 1386-1389.
Gregg, P., & Macmillan, L. (2010). Family income, education and cognitive ability in the next generation: exploring income gradients in education and test scores for current cohorts of youth. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, 1(3), 259-280.

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This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.