The 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7 sweep using the Human Figure Drawing measure.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | General ability (perceptual) |
| Measures: | General mental and perceptual ability. Purports to measure cognitive maturation. |
| CHC: | Gv (Visual Processing) |
| Administrative method: | Teacher at school; face to face; pen and paper |
| Procedure: | The child was asked to ‘make a picture of a man’, within the rectangular frame. They were asked to make the best picture they could and to draw a whole person, not just a face or head. |
| Duration: (expected 60 - 90 minutes for all 3 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 UK Data Service website. |
| Scoring: | Awarded a mark out of 100 according to the features that were included |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | N1840 |
| Age of participant (months): | Mean = 85.11, SD = 1.56, Range = 82 - 93 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 14,642 | |
| Range = 0 - 53 | |
| Mean = 23.84 | |
| SD = 7.08 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Other sweep and/or cohort: | BCS70 – Age 5 – Human Figure Drawing (different scoring system) |
| Source: | Modified version of the ‘Draw-a-man’ test (Goodenough, 1926) and later developed by Harris (1963). |
| Goodenough, F. L. (1926). The measurement of intelligence by drawings, New York: World Book Company. | |
| Harris, D. B. (1963). Children's drawings as measures of intellectual maturity, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. | |
| Scoring was based on: Koppitz, E M. (1968). Psychological Evaluation of Children’s Human Figure Drawings. New York: Grune and Stratton | |
| Technical resources: | Shepherd, P. Measures of ability at ages 7 to 16. National Child Development Study User Guide, 2012. |
| Reference examples: | Schoon, I., Bynner, J., Joshi, H., Parsons, S., Wiggins, R. D., & Sacker, A. (2002). The influence of context, timing, and duration of risk experiences for the passage from childhood to midadulthood. Child Development, 73(5), 1486-1504. |
| Schoon, I., & Parsons, S. (2002). Competence in the face of adversity: the influence of early family environment and long‐term consequences. Children & Society, 16(4), 260-272. |
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in NCDS
- Overview of childhood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.