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

By James J. Heckman, Yona Rubinstein. 2001

1,568 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c6fe81953f1e52f0d9e139648ffd68f5381b6aa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Flávio Cunha
2. Lance Lochner
3. Roy Thurik
4. James J. Heckman
5. J. van der Sluis
6. Joop Hartog
7. Dimitriy V. Masterov
8. M. van Praag

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Thomas J. Dohmen
2. James J. Heckman
3. Armin Falk
4. Flávio Cunha
5. Lance Lochner
6. Angela L. Duckworth
7. Uwe Sunde
8. Dimitriy V. Masterov

Citations in the corpus

• The Payoff to Skill in the Third Industrial Revolution1 (2013, background): “The most famous one rests on the distinction between cognitive and noncognitive skills and shows that the latter contribute substantially to wages ðMoss and Tilly 1996; Dunifon and Duncan 1998; Heckman and Rubinstein 2001; Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua 2006Þ.”
• The Inheritance of Inequality (2002, neutral): “The empirical importance of these traits is suggested in a number of studies (Duncan and Dunifon 1998, Heckman and Rubinstein 2001, Kuhn and Weinberger 2001, Heckman forthcoming).”
• Does it Pay to Be Nice? Personality and Earnings in the United Kingdom (2011, background): “…the GED test are as smart as ordinary high school graduates, their findings suggest that GED participants earn less than other dropouts because they “are ‘wiseguys’, who lack the abilities to think ahead, to persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments” (Heckman and Rubinstein, 2001: 146).”
• Soft Skills for the Workplace (2013, background): “First, Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) showed that students who dropped out of high school but received GEDs possessed cognitive skills equal to those of high school graduates (based on standardized cognitive test scores) but had poorer performance in the workforce (e.g., lower wages, higher…”
• Complementing classroom learning through outdoor adventure education: out-of-school-time experiences that make a difference (2018, background): “Collectively, these psychological factors and related behaviors are sometimes referred to as noncognitive skills as they cannot be measured directly by traditional academic assessments (Heckman & Rubinstein, 2001; Shechtman, DeBarger, Dornsife, Rosier, & Yarnall, 2013).”
• Employer Voices, Employer Demands, and Implications for Public Skills Development Policy (2014, background): “11 Individual studies find conditional correlations between socio-emotional skills and wages (Heckman and Rubenstein 2001; Kern et al. 2013; Mueller and Plug 2006; Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzu´a 2006), professional success (Duckworth et al. 2007), absenteeism in the work place (Stormer and Fahr 2010),…”
• A Century of Grading Research (2016, neutral): “In the search for assessments of noncognitive factors that predict educational outcomes (Heckman & Rubinstein, 2001; Levin, 2013), grades appear to be useful.”
• The Intergenerational Transmission of Risk and Trust Attitudes (2012, neutral): “See, e.g., Bowles and Gintis (2002a); Osborne (2005); Heckman and Rubinstein (2001); Heckman et al. (2006).”
• The Effect of Schooling and Ability on Achievement Test Scores (2003, neutral): “(See the evidence on the importance of noncognitive factors in Heckman and Rubinstein, 2001)”
• The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments (2016, neutral): “[129] Heckman, James, and Yona Rubenstein.”
• The Non-Cognitive Returns to Class Size (2008, neutral): “Heckman and Rubenstein (2001) argued that the GED is a “mixed signal” that attracts high school dropouts with relatively high cognitive skills but lower levels of unspecified non-cognitive skills that are relevant for educational attainment and valued in the labor market.”
• What Shall We Do About Grit? A Critical Review of What We Know and What We Don’t Know (2018, neutral): “Findings described by Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) and Lindqvist and Vestman (2011) suggest that noncognitive attributes may help individuals who did not graduate from college to avoid various negative behaviors and outcomes such as frequent switching of jobs, low wages, and even drug use and…”