The 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) assessed the children of a sub-sample of cohort members (CMs) using the Peabody Individual Achievement Test’s (PIAT) Maths Subscale.
The child assessments included in the NCDS5 Child Interview (conducted when the CM was aged 33) applied only to the natural or adopted children of CMs aged 3 years, 11 months, and 16 days or older. Some 3,575 (71 percent) of the cohort children identified were eligible for the Child Interview. The tests were based on those used by the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) for their 1990 survey of the children of female respondents. These tests were developed in the US and a number of changes (mainly substituting terminology) were made to individual assessments for use in the NCDS.
Prior to administering these tests, the interviewer calculated the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) age of the child (actual age rounded up or down to the nearest whole month) to establish, if the child was eligible for testing, which tests would be administered and, for some tests, the appropriate starting point of the test. Time at start and completion (24 hour clock) was calculated using the following variables: n520128 n520130 n521935 n521937.
The PIAT: Maths Subscale was administered if the child was aged 3 years, 11 months, and 16 days or older. Details on this measure and the data collected are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Mathematics |
| Measures: | Mathematics achievement. Covers a wide range from early skills, such as recognising numerals, and progresses to measuring more advanced concepts in geometry and trigonometry. |
| CHC: | Gq (Quantitative Knowledge) |
| Administrative method: | Interviewer at home; face to face; read and child selects |
| Procedure: | Consists of 84 multiple-choice items of increasing difficulty. The interviewer read out the question and the child selected an answer from one of four. |
| The interviewer: | |
| identified the start point (using the PPVT age) | |
| established basal (5 correct answers in a row) and ceiling (5 out of 7 responses wrong) points. | |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Ncds5d.pdf (opens new tab) |
| Scoring: | Last item (out of 84) reached on test (ceiling) minus the total number of incorrect responses. |
| (see source materials) | |
| Item-level variable(s): | n520949-n521222 (individual items) |
| n520947 (start PLATE no. - age range (12 months) into which CM falls | |
| n521223 (casal 5/5 right) | |
| n521224 (ceiling 5/7 wrong) | |
| n521225 (basal plate no.) | |
| n521227 (ceiling plate no.) | |
| n521229 (total no. errors) | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | n521231 (total maths score = ceiling - total no. errors) |
| Age of participant: | Mean = 109.38, SD = 34.40, Range = 48 - 224 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 2,632 | |
| Range = 1 - 84 | |
| Mean = 38.38 | |
| SD = 16.61 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
|
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None |
| Source: | Dunn, L. M., & Markwardt Jr, F. C. (1970). Peabody Individual Achievement Test Manual (Circle Pines, MN American Guidance Service). |
| Technical resources: | National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, (1988). Child Data (Columbus, Ohio Center for Human Resource Research, The Ohio State University). |
| Reference examples: | Verropoulou, G., & Joshi, H. (2009). Does mother’s employment conflict with child development? Multilevel analysis of British mothers born in 1958. Journal of Population Economics, 22(3), 665-692. |
| Michael, R. (2011). Family caring and children's reading and math skills. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, 2(3), 301-318. | |
| Parcel, T. L., & Campbell, L. A. (2017). Can the welfare state replace parents? Children's cognition in the United States and Great Britain. Social Science Research, 64, 79-95. |
For the named items in the table above, links are provided (where applicable) to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery. Where a variable range is provided, full variable lists can be accessed through the ‘Variable Groups’ tab on the linked Discovery Page.
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’.