Non-cognitive Skills

Skills, in general, are defined by society, valued in manifestation, and improved through training. Cognitive skills include adapting, learning, reasoning, and engaging thought to overcome obstacles: reading, writing and numeracy. “Non-cognitive skills comprise personal traits, attitudes and motivations” (Zhou, 2016, p. 2). This review explores non-cognitive skills that have positive impacts on employment outcomes and can be significantly improved through training. Because operational definitions and functional measurements are not clear for self-perception of ability, motivation, metacognitive strategies, resilience, coping and creativity, this literature review focuses on perseverance, self-control and social skills.

Perseverance is the ability to achieve long-term goals in the face of challenges and setbacks; it is a strong measure of success for students, teachers and the military. Early childhood education students and people who are employed show strong measures of perseverance. Teaching children that the brain changes when faced with challenges helps develop perseverance. Reflecting on failure can improve perseverance and performance on cognitive tasks: Envision and plan how to break obstacles.

Self-control is the ability to change reactions in order to meet long-term goals. “Self-control is a coherent but multidimensional construct after examining the convergent validity among different measures, which means that multiple ways of measurement are needed (Zhou, 2016, p. 5). Interventions implemented through education and parenting can mitigate risk factors that could negatively impact self-control. “Teacher’s emotional support is positively related to child’s aggression and behavioral self-control” (Zhou, 2016, p. 6): See Tools of the Mind curriculum.
 
Social skills are used to develop positive relations with others. They tend to have a great impact on academic success. Social skills are influenced by culture. Accuracy in perceiving others has been linked to financial success. Social skills training interventions have had mixed results.
 
The majority of OECD countries have integrated non-cognitive skills into their curriculum, although these skills vary by country. “The implementation of the OECD’s PISA 2012 and the World Bank’s STEP which both include some direct questions on non-cognitive skills reveals that the direct measures of non-cognitive skills are being advanced” (Zhou, 2016, p. 9). The challenge to measuring non-cognitive skills is an inability to use standardized tests. Because these measures are self-reported, they reflect a combination of non-cognitive, cognitive, emotional and environmental variables.
 
REFERENCE
Zhou, K. (2016). Non-cognitive skills: Definitions, measurement and malleability. Paper commissioned for the Global Education Monitoring Report 2016, Education for people and planet: Creating sustainable futures for all.
 
INSIGHT
Resilience becomes especially difficult to assess because it includes components from all domains, as well as their applicable measurement limitations. Most fascinating is the conclusion that malleability is measurably apparent in non-cognitive skills. The logical conclusion being that resilience, too, can change.