The impact of early cognitive and non-cognitive skills on later outcomes
By Alissa Goodman, Pedro Carneiro, Claire E. Crawford. 2007
302 citations recorded by the source corpus.
When describing the determinants of economic or social outcomes, economists often focus on cognitive skill. Failure to take into account other dimensions of skill may misguide policy design. In this paper, we analyse the consequences and determinants of cognitive and non-cognitive (social) skills at age 7, using data for Great Britain from the National Child Development Study. We find that an overall measure of noncognitive skills is important for a host of later outcomes, including educational attainment, employment status, wages, smoking, truancy, teenage pregnancy, involvement in crime and health. In many cases, we find that the importance of social skills is greater for individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds than it is for individuals from high socio-economic backgrounds, suggesting that investment in non-cognitive skills may reduce inequality. Finally, our work suggests that social skills may be more malleable than cognitive skills, which – if true – suggests that there may be scope for policy to affect social skills and hence outcomes. 1 We are grateful to the Department for Education and Skills (now the Department for Education) for funding this work through the Centre for the Economics of Education and for co-funding from the Economic and Social Research Council via the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS (grant number RES-544-28-0001). Carneiro gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council through the ESRC Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (grant reference RES-589-28-0001), and the hospitality of Georgetown University and the Poverty Unit of the World Bank Research Group.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11401fda952cacff5b599e0cfdf5256a27c75a32
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In Education
Citations in the corpus
- What Do Test Scores Miss? The Importance of Teacher Effects on Non–Test Score Outcomes (2018, unknown): “9 Low agreeableness and high neuroticism are associated with more absences, externalizing behaviors, delinquency, and lower educational attainment ( John et al. 1994; Barbaranelli et al. 2003; Lounsbury et al. 2004; Carneiro, Crawford, and Goodman 2007).”
- The role of attitudes and behaviours in explaining socio-economic differences in attainment at age 16 (2010, background): “…complements a growing economics literature which emphasises the importance of the development of social skills and positive behaviours both for cognitive development and for longer-term labour market and social outcomes (see Bowles et al., 2001, Heckman et al., 2006, and Carneiro et al., 2007).”
- Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment* (2018, unknown): “This paper also contributes to a growing literature on non-cognitive skills, which have been shown to affect long-term outcomes like wages as much as cognitive skills (Heckman and Rubinstein, 2001; Heckman et al., 2006; Lindqvist and Vestman, 2011; Carneiro et al., 2007; Adhvaryu et al., 2016).”
- Employer Voices, Employer Demands, and Implications for Public Skills Development Policy (2014, background): “12 In fact, these skills may be more important than cognitive skills for employment outcomes, especially among low-skilled occupations (Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne 2001; Mueller and Plug 2006; Carneiro, Crawford, and Goodman 2007; Kniesner and ter Weel 2008).”
- Non-Cognitive Ability, Test Scores, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from 9th Grade Teachers in North Carolina (2012, unknown): “To quantify the extent to which including both , ˆj noncog and , ˆj test in [9] increases our ability to”