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source & credit: The Annie E. Casey Foundation
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Synopsis
Dr. Brian Davidson (the Intrinsic Institute)
advocates for placing greater focus on developing students’ non-cognitive
skills.
By
Brian Davidson
"What
knowledge is of most worth for students to learn?" questioned our
professor. “What is most necessary for students to know?” he probed.
These were the central questions posed to us in our doctoral class as we
worked toward understanding our own philosophies of education while developing
greater meaning of why we teach our students what we do. When it came
time for me to present my thoughts on what knowledge is most valuable for
students, however, I took a different approach. Rather than debate the merits
of famous educational theorists like John Dewey or Ralph Tyler, I shared with
our class a study led by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman of the University
of Pennsylvania that found that self-discipline was twice as good as IQ at
predicting student academic performance. After describing the
groundbreaking results of the study, I then followed with a question to the
class..."If this is the case, why are we not trying to explicitly build
self-discipline and other factors like it in students?" I continued
to describe how our entire focus in education has been on developing a set of
cognitive skills in students, with little to no focus on developing this other
set of skills. As these thoughts were shared, the class went silent, as
an entire group of educators just shared in a moment of epiphany…
Since
that time, a growing body of research continues to build suggesting there are a
set of skills beyond IQ and cognitive ability that drive success. More
commonly referred to as non-cognitive skills, these are the various factors not
easily measured on achievement and IQ tests. Indeed, scholars in this
field largely agree the name "non-cognitive skills" is a misnomer
since the skills that encompass the term are not truly free of cognition.
Despite the challenge in name, though, one thing is becoming increasingly
clear. These skills matter, and they matter a lot. Researchers in fields
of psychology, education, and behavioral economics are coming to an agreement
that these skills are significant predictors of numerous successful life
outcomes such as academic achievement, physical and mental health, and positive
labor market outcomes.
So
what are these non-cognitive skills? They are the intangibles - the
"it" factors like grit, hope, growth mindset, self-control,
resiliency, self-efficacy - that drive greatness, whether it be within students
in the classroom, athletes on the field, or employees in an organization.
These are the skills teachers love to see in their students. These are
the skills coaches desire to find in their athletes. And these are also
the skills that employers seek to find within the individuals leading their
organizations. In recognizing the power of these non-cognitive skills, major
testing companies are now in the process of developing assessments that target
these skills. Likewise, institutions of higher education are beginning to move
beyond simply looking at ACT and SAT scores and are now placing greater
attention on applicants' non-cognitive skills when determining which students
to admit to their universities. Most recently, the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) announced that beginning in 2017, they will also
begin measuring non-cognitive skills as part of their assessment of the
nation’s students.
With
all of this in mind, I want to go back to the question I posed to my group of
classmates - Why, then, are we not spending more time explicitly working to
develop this extremely important group of skills in students? Having been
an educator for nearly a decade, I firmly believe the 3 R's - reading, writing,
and arithmetic - are extremely important for student achievement.
However, I also realize there is so much more beyond those 3 R's that
contribute to student success, both in the classroom and, more importantly, in
life. When we think back to the greatest teachers we had growing up as
children, rarely do we think of them in such high regard because of the content
knowledge they taught us. Instead, these transformational educators made
us feel different. They helped us to become more motivated to accomplish
our goals, more disciplined and gritty to stay committed to those goals we
dreamed to achieve, and more resilient to bounce back when life knocked us
down. In other words, they cultivated in us higher levels of
non-cognitive skills that contributed to our later success.
What
if the school day included a class to explicitly teach these skills? What
if, in addition to learning science, math, English, and social studies, we also
had classes designed to explicitly help students become more self-motivated,
perseverant, disciplined, and resilient? What if students could learn the
positive mindsets needed to prevent them from being debilitated by the fear of
failure? What if we had classes to help students learn how to develop the
social capital needed to achieve their highest aspirations? What if we
spent more time developing the skills that society deems most
important?
If
we truly want to ignite the greatness within our students, let's take a more
holistic approach to developing students and begin placing more focus on
building the other set of skills that are equally as important as what we’ve
always been teaching - let's focus on building students' non-cognitive
skills.
Originally published in The Creativity Post
Dr. Brian Davidson
Brian Davidson is the founder and president of
the Intrinsic Institute, a
research, coaching, and consulting firm discovering and building the best in
individuals and organizations. The Intrinsic Institute specializes in the
measurement, training, and development of non-cognitive skills, the intangible
“it” factors such as self-motivation, grit, and resiliency driving greatness.
With a mission to ignite the greatness within, the Intrinsic Institute partners
with individuals, educational institutions, and businesses to build the
non-cognitive skills that drive exceptional human performance.
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