The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 8 sweep using the Reading Comprehension measure.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
Domain: | Verbal (reading) | |
Measures: | Word comprehension/lexical knowledge | |
Reading comprehension | ||
Reading decoding | ||
CHC: | Gc (Crystallized intelligence) | |
Grw (Reading/writing) | ||
Administration method: | Teacher/psychologist/trained individual; 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. “Come with me to the shops to buy some (fire, water, stone, sweets, motors)”. 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 awarded per correct answer (0 - 35) | |
Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available | |
Total score/derived variable(s): | SC8R, SC8R54, SC854, SC8N | |
Descriptives: | Raw score | Normalised score |
N = 4,259 | N = 4,259 | |
Range = 0 - 34 | Range = 69 - 153 | |
Mean = 14.20 | Mean = 102.16 |
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SD = 7.78 | SD = 15.16 |
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(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
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Age of participants: | 8 years 6 months | |
Other sweep and/or cohort: | NCDS – Age 11 – Reading Comprehension Test | |
NCDS – Age 16 – Reading Comprehension Test | ||
NSHD – Age 15 – The Watts-Vernon Reading Test | ||
NSHD – Age 26 – The Watts-Vernon Reading Test | ||
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 | |
Reference examples: | 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. |
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in NSHD
- 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’.