174 A CONTR0LLEO POPULATION BASED STUDY OF THE COGNITIVE SKILLS AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT OF 8 YEAR OLD VERY LOW BIRTHWEIGHT CHILDREN IN SCOTLAND

Abstract

AIMS: To investigate the cognitive development of all 339 very low birthweight (VLBW) children born and still resident in Scotland at the age of 8 years, in comparison to two classroom peers. We also hypothesized that poor performance on the visual recognition subscale at 4 yrs would correlate with poor reading skills at 8 yrs.METHOD: Seven subscales of the British Ability Scales were used, testing short term visual and auditory memory, verbal reasoning, spatial imagery, visual reasoning, application of knowledge stored in long term memory and speed of information processing, from which an IQ was estimated. School attainment was assessed using the basic numbers skills and word reading scales.RESULTS: For 24 (7%) of the children receiving special education, no suitable comparison children were available. A 96% follow up rate was achieved. The VLBW children had significantly lower mean IQ scores than their controls (93.2, SE 0.77 vs 101.3, SE 0.51); for the attainment tasks and for all of the cognitive subscales except short term auditory memory, their performance was significantly poorer. Visual recognition scores at 4 tyears were not correlated with reading scores at 8 years.CONCLUSIONS: Teaching techniques based on a phonetic approach may be more appropriate for those children not succeeding in acquiring reading skills by other methods based on short term visual memory.