A key issue to arise in the course of the school component of the pilot was the difficulty for principals in providing the individual-level information on the Growing up in Ireland study who were attending their school. As noted above, in the first round of interviews the Study Children were 9 years of age and were all attending primary school12 where they had one class
teacher. The class teacher completed their individual ‘Teacher-on-Pupil’ questionnaire. By 13 years of age they had generally made the transition to secondary school where they had multiple subject teachers, none of whom knew the child sufficiently well to complete the detailed ‘Teacher-on-Pupil’ questionnaire which was completed at 9 years of age. The Principal’s Worksheet on the 13-year-olds in the school was an attempt to record some level of information on the individual child. Even providing this limited level of information, however, proved very difficult for the principal, requiring the collation of details from numerous teachers about a single child.
Two concerns arose in the light of the pilot regarding the cognitive tests completed by the children. First was the lack of a strong relationship between the pilot test results and the child’s background characteristics. It was a source of concern that there was no evidence of the usual relationship between the child’s performance on the cognitive tests and almost all measures of family background characteristics. In general, one would expect children from
more advantaged backgrounds (measured in terms of parental education; family social class, family income or any other measure of human or social capital) would perform better on the tests. There was no evidence of this trend in the pilot results, however. Secondly, concerns were raised by several educationalists in Ireland on the lack of fit which the performance tests have with the secondary school curriculum.
In planning for the pilot only one test which was related to the Irish curriculum (the Drumcondra Reasoning Test designed by the Educational Research Centre in Dublin) was deemed suitable for this age group. The Drumcondra Reasoning Test (DRT) is an objective, group-administered test of cognitive skills which can be used to assess students in transition between primary and post-primary schooling, or in the early years of post-primary schooling. The test contains two subtests: Verbal Reasoning and Numerical Ability. Answers are marked on a hand-scorable answer sheet, and then scored using a scoring stencil, or on a machine- scorable OCR13 basis. The test takes approximately 1½ hours to administer. In preparing the
pilot it was felt that this was would pose an unacceptably high burden on the child and would have a very negative effect on response rates (cross-sectionally and longitudinally). Respondent burden was the single most important reason for not using the Drumcondra Reasoning Test (DRT) in the pilot. In light of what the Study Team interpreted as an ambiguous experience with the BAS the developers of the Drumcondra Reasoning Test developed a bespoke reduction of the standard test for use with 13-year-olds in Growing Up in Ireland. This reduced version of the DRT had an administration time of approximately 15 and 20 minutes on the numeracy and verbal components respectively. The reduced test was based on a subset of items from the main test.
The distinction between ability and achievement is important. The literature on both can be somewhat confusing. Both constructs are referred to by a variety of terms and are measured in a number of different ways. Cognitive ability is also referred to in the literature as aptitude (Martin & O'Rourke, 1984); intelligence or IQ (Duckworth & Seligman, 2006). It attempts to measure scholastic ability unlinked to the school curriculum. A high scholastic ability does reflect a certain element of skill acquisitions (literacy/numeracy) but not a knowledge of the curriculum per se. Academic achievement tests, on the other hand, measure performance and can be strongly influenced by factors such as school attendance and engagement; pupil’s personality traits, motivation and effort; the extent of parental support; and the provision of appropriate learning experiences, teaching quality, school ethos, and structure among other possible factors (Deary, Strand, Smith, & Fernandes, 2007).
Tests of cognitive ability were initially developed in an attempt to predict individual differences in educational outcomes and there is a general agreement that the two are
moderately to strongly correlated (Deary et al., 2007). A large, longitudinal study of over 70,000 English students found a correlation of 0.81 between cognitive ability tests at age 11 and national school examinations at age 16, across 25 individual subjects (Deary et al., 2007). In the Irish context, performance in the verbal and numerical reasoning components of the Differential Aptitude Test was found to be highly predictive of Junior Certificate grades (Hannan, Smyth, McCullagh, O’Leary & McMahon, 1996). Their predictive nature of subsequent performance in State and other examinations underlines the importance of ensuring that the most appropriate test is included in the main phase of fieldwork. As will be discussed in Chapter 10 below, in light of the experience of the cognitive tests used in the main pilot, an important recommendation from that phase of the work is the testing of the Drumcondra Reasoning Test in a further pilot stage with the 13-year-olds prior to main fieldwork.
Chapter 5
MAIN PILOT – INSTRUMENTS IN
HOME-BASED COMPONENT
5 MAIN PILOT – INSTRUMENTS IN HOME-BASED COMPONENT 5.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter outlines the topics covered by the various home-based instruments used in the pilot at Wave 2. The questionnaires are included in Appendix C (with some copyrighted items redacted).
The following is a complete list of all instruments administered in the home in the course of the pilot.
1. Primary Caregiver questionnaire (main and supplementary sections)
2. Secondary Caregiver questionnaire (main and supplementary sections)
3. Questionnaire modules for Twins and Triplets
4. Child Main Questionnaire
5. Child Sensitive (Part 1)
6. Child sensitive (Part 2)
7. British Ability Scales (BAS) Matrices
8. British Ability Scales (BAS) Verbal Similarities
9. Early School-Leaver’s Questionnaire
10. *Non-resident parent questionnaire
*This item was issued by the Study Team on a postal basis and self-completed by non-resident parent/regular carer, where relevant (for more details see Section 5.9 below).
A brief description of each is given below, to give a flavour of their content. The reader is directed to Appendix C to review the content more fully. The scales used in the course of the home interviews are discussed separately in Chapter 8.