The Importance of Noncognitive Skills: Lessons from the GED Testing Program

It is common knowledge outside of academic journals that motivation, tenacity, trustworthiness, and perseverance are important traits for success in life. Thomas Edison wrote that “genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Most parents read the Aesop fable of the “Tortoise and The Hare” to their young children at about the same time they read them the story of “The Little Train That Could.” Numerous instances can be cited of high-IQ people who failed to achieve success in life because they lacked self discipline and low-IQ people who succeeded by virtue of persistence, reliability, and self-discipline. The value of trustworthiness has recently been demonstrated when market systems were extended to Eastern European societies with traditions of corruption and deceit. It is thus surprising that academic discussions of skill and skill formation almost exclusively focus on measures of cognitive ability and ignore noncognitive skills. The early literature on human capital (e.g. Gary Becker, 1964) contrasted cognitive-ability models of earnings with human capital models, ignoring noncognitive traits entirely. The signaling literature (e.g., Michael Spence, 1974), emphasized that education was a signal of a one-dimensional ability, usually interpreted as a cognitive skill. Most discussions of ability bias in the estimated re- turn to education treat omitted ability as cognitive ability and attempt to proxy the missing ability by cognitive tests. Most assessments of school reforms stress the gain from reforms as measured by the ability of students to perform on a standardized achievement test. Widespread use of standardized achievement and ability tests for admissions and educational evaluation are premised on the belief that the skills that can be tested are essential for success in schooling, a central premise of the educational-testing movement since its inception. Much of the neglect of noncognitive skills in analyses of earnings, schooling, and other lifetime outcomes is due to the lack of any reliable measure of them. Many different personality and motivational traits are lumped into the category of noncognitive skills. Psychologists have developed batteries of tests to measure noncognitive skills (e.g., Robert Sternberg, 1985). These tests are used by companies to screen workers but are not yet used to ascertain college readiness or to evaluate the effectiveness of schools or reforms of schools. The literature on cognitive tests ascertains that one dominant factor (“g”) summarizes cognitive tests and their effects on outcomes. No single factor has yet emerged to date in the literature on noncognitive skills, and it is unlikely that one will ever be found, given the diversity of traits subsumed under the category of noncognitive skills.

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