The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7.5 sweep (Focus@7) using the Spelling Task.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Verbal ability (spelling) |
| Measures: | Spelling ability |
| CHC: | Grw (Reading/Writing) |
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; pen and paper |
| Procedure: | Based on a pilot study of several hundred children (Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes, Personal Communication). The interviewer asked the child to spell 15 words, both regular and irregular, that increased in difficulty. For each word, the interviewer i) read it aloud, and ii) used it in a sentence. The child was asked to write down the correct spelling of the word. |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | The main score was calculated by summing the correct number of items (0 - 15) |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not readily available |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | f7ws116 - f7ws122 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 7,912 | |
| Range = 0 - 15 | |
| Mean = 7.82 | |
| SD = 4.38 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Age of participants: | Mean = 90.5 months, SD =3.83, Range = 82- 113 |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | ALSPAC – Age 9 – Spelling Task |
| Source: | (Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes, Personal Communication) |
| Technical resources: | None |
| Reference examples: | Paracchini D Phil, S., Steer, C. D., Buckingham, L. L., Morris, A. P., Ring, S., Scerri D Phil, T., ... & Monaco, A. P. (2008). Association of the KIAA0319 dyslexia susceptibility gene with reading skills in the general population. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(12), 1576-1584. |
| Schoemaker, M. M., Lingam, R., Jongmans, M. J., van Heuvelen, M. J., & Emond, A. (2013). Is severity of motor coordination difficulties related to co-morbidity in children at risk for developmental coordination disorder? Research in Developmental Disabilities, 34(10), 3084-3091. |
For the named items in the table above, links are provided 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 ALSPAC
- 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’.