This blog post was originally shared on http://educationcommissionblog.gatech.edu/. 

There has been a great deal of discussion in the research literature for the past three to four years about non-cognitive skills, their role in education and in preparation for students’ futures, and to what degree they can be measured. Non-cognitive skills also go by a number of other names: soft skills, 21st Century skills, character skills, personal success skills, grit, and even executive function. Unfortunately, none of these terms has stuck and the research and educational communities are finding it difficult to coalesce around one term. This is telling, actually, because the skills we are talking about are analyzed through a number of lenses – psychology, education, sociology, and economics, just to name a few.

Lucinda Fickel contributed an article to U.S. News & World Report in May 2015 in which she said, “It’s hard to take something seriously when it has a boring, uninspired name, and it’s hard to galvanize a movement around a diffuse and jumbled set of concepts.” I would not presume to try to outthink the experts by coming up with my own term. So, for the purposes of this post, I’m going to stick with “non-cognitive skills” not so much for what they are but for what they are notCognition is defined as “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” Thus non-cognitive skills refer to those skills that are not used for the acquisition of knowledge. They’re used for this amorphous something else – strip away all the content that a student learns in school, and non-cognitive skills are everything else they either bring with them or acquire during the learning process. You may disagree with me on this, and of course, that’s one of the problems with trying to nail down the concept.

But, let’s review a few ideas that the experts define as one form or another of non-cognitive skills:

  • Grit – This is a popular concept in educational hypotheses about why some students perform better than others even when two students can appear identical in typical predictors of student success: ability, teaching quality, classroom resources, and family support. More to the point students with higher IQ scores – the “smart kids” – often do not perform as well as students with lower IQ scores. What’s the difference? Often also referred to as “resilience” or “persistence,” grit is Angela Duckworth’s term for “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” Duckworth’s research highlights differences in high- and low-achievers, noting that intelligence is not as strong a predictor as we once thought; rather, the will to strive to achieve one’s learning goals makes a big difference. There has been some question recently as to whether grit actually makes a difference in educational attainment when compared with other factors (such as IQ and personality); and if it does, is it teachable?
  • Growth Mindset – This is Carol Dweck’s term for the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. Contrast this with a fixed mindset, which is where a student believes that he or she is only going able to learn a certain fixed amount, for example, the belief that one is not good in math and will never be good in math. The growth mindset says no, that there is value in a “productive struggle” where those who are challenged will continue to learn more. Students who are praised for doing good work, says Dweck, have less desire to continue to learn and when they do meet obstacles, they tend to give up. On the other hand, students who are told, “there is always more you can learn,” who are invested in their learning, and who are recognized for genuine effort will fight to make greater learning gains. They have a growth mindset.
  • 21st Century Skills – I find the term “21st century skills” a bit humorous if only because placing an emphasis on teaching 21st century skills implies that what is currently being taught are 20th century skills – and yet we’re 16 years into the 21st Nevertheless, what organizations such as the Partnership for 21st Century Learning have proposed are indeed valued in the workplace, underemphasized in the educational system, and not measured completely enough in the research. 21st century skills are broader than grit and the growth mindset in that they include skills such as information literacy and technological competence while also including creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, flexibility, initiative, productivity, and leadership. All of these are coupled with key content knowledge necessary to be effective members of 21st century society – mathematics, languages, science, geography, history, and so on.
  • Navigating Institutions – This final type of non-cognitive skill is one that is more sociological than psychological. (See the works of U. Penn sociologist Annette Lareau here and here.) I include it here because it speaks directly to the issues we in higher education face when trying to understand differences in student performance by socioeconomic status (SES). You see, SES is not just about income. It is traditionally measured also by educational level (or parents’ educational levels), occupational status (same) and even household possessions, such as the number of computers or the amount of educational media available to a child. Students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds tend to have more experience, thanks to their parents, in navigating educational institutions. They know – or can easily find out – how to write a persuasive essay for a college application, how to fill out a financial aid application, whom to contact when needing writing assistance for class, and even how to relate socially and culturally to their middle-class professors. This social and cultural capital can have a strong impact on academic success.

When it comes to measuring concepts like the above, researchers make a valid argument for expanding our horizons: our measurement and assessment systems in American schooling – both at the K-12 and postsecondary levels – are woefully inadequate. Educators still fall into the familiar groove of multiple-choice questions and standardized tests. The appeal of those tools is easy to see: they are scalable. Beyond the initial investment to create them, educators can use them over and over again at very little additional cost. What’s more, those tools make comparisons among students and groups much easier. It is much more time consuming and – gasp! – “qualitative” to provide substantive feedback to each learner about not only their content mastery but also their willingness to rise to a challenge or their perseverance when faced with repeated failures. Nevertheless, according to researchers such as Duckworth and Dweck, that is the kind of feedback learners need if they are to succeed. Applied sociologists, too, would argue that students from lower- and working-class backgrounds need support in navigating institutions of higher learning. But how do we teach that without condescension, and how do we report students’ difficulties in those areas when we see them? “Johnny would do well to study the university’s organization chart and focus on increasing his motivation…” I don’t think that’s going to fly.

Institutions of higher learning are starting to find ways to implement and measure some 21stcentury skills. We can count the number of collaborative opportunities provided to students in our classes and describe the quality of those experiences. We can require presentations instead of papers to foster verbal communication skills. Measuring how much a student can “think critically” is perhaps a bit more difficult, but organizations such as The Foundation for Critical Thinking are adapting psychological assessments (surveys instruments) to measure students’ uses of information search and retrieval, organization of key concepts, and making inferences based on data.

In sum, non-cognitive skills have merit. They can explain differences in student achievement and mastery not only of a course’s content but also workplace skills and social stewardship. The biggest problem we have is that they are not easily measured. Measurement takes time and money – more so than any standardized test – and produces results that require close reading and interpretation. Measuring and understanding non-cognitive skills takes work. But that’s no reason not to try.