The 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7 sweep using the Southgate Group Reading Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Verbal (reading) |
| Measures: | Reading ability (word recognition and comprehension) |
| Particularly suited to identifying children with reading difficulties. | |
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallised ability) |
| Grw (Reading/writing) | |
| Administrative method: | Teacher at school in a group; face to face; read aloud and by the child |
| Procedure: | On 16 (of 30) occasions, the child was given a picture of an object and had to ring the word, from 5 different options describing that object in the picture. On the other 14 occasions, the teacher read out a word and the child had to circle the correct one. |
| Duration: The test lasted approximately 15-20 minutes (expected 60 -90 minutes for all 4 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: | 30 items. Each correct answer receives one mark. The total of possible marks for the test is 30. |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | N92 |
| Age of participant (months): | Mean = 85.11, SD = 1.56, Range = 82 - 93 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 14,929 | |
| Range = 0 - 30 | |
| Mean = 23.34 | |
| SD = 7.14 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None |
| Source: | Southgate, V. (1962). Southgate Group Reading Tests: Manual of Instructions. University of London Press |
| Technical resources: | Shepherd, P. Measures of ability at ages 7 to 16. National Child Development Study User Guide, 2012. |
| Pringle, M. K., Butler, N. & Davie, R. (1966). 11,000 Seven Year Olds. Longman, in association with National Children's Bureau | |
| Reference examples: | Currie, J., & Thomas, D. (1999). Early test scores, socioeconomic status and future outcomes (No. w6943). National Bureau of Economic Research. |
| Richards, M., Power, C., & Sacker, A. (2009). Paths to literacy and numeracy problems: evidence from two British birth cohorts. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 63(3), 239-244. |
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’.