Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition

By James J. Heckman, Tim Kautz. Social Science Research Network, 2013

586 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews the recent literature on measuring and boosting cognitive and noncognitive skills. The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character skills--personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences--that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. Their predictive power rivals that of cognitive skills. Reliable measures of character have been developed. All measures of character and cognition are measures of performance on some task. In order to reliably estimate skills from tasks, it is necessary to standardize for incentives, effort, and other skills when measuring any particular skill. Character is a skill, not a trait. At any age, character skills are stable across different tasks, but skills can change over the life cycle. Character is shaped by families, schools, and social environments. Skill development is a dynamic process, in which the early years lay the foundation for successful investment in later years. High-quality early childhood and elementary school programs improve character skills in a lasting and cost-effective way. Many of them beneficially affect later-life outcomes without improving cognition. There are fewer long-term evaluations of adolescent interventions, but workplace-based programs that teach character skills are promising. The common feature of successful interventions across all stages of the life cycle through adulthood is that they promote attachment and provide a secure base for exploration and learning for the child. Successful interventions emulate the mentoring environments offered by successful families.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f32ea56cfea7afda69de8eaf8c0eed55027e9fc

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Citations in the corpus

Promise and Paradox (2016, background): “Furthermore, non-cognitive skills may be more amenable to direct intervention than cognitive ability, particularly beyond infancy and early childhood (Cunha & Heckman, 2008; Dee & West, 2011; Heckman & Kautz, 2013).”
The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments (2016, unknown): “[131] Heckman, James, and Tim Kautz.”
Generating Employment in Poor and Fragile States: Evidence from Labor Market and Entrepreneurship Programs (2015, background): “Most of the evidence is on children and adolescents, as outlined by Heckman and Kautz (2013); Hill et al. (2011).”
Children's school readiness skills across the pre-K year: Associations with teacher-student interactions, teacher practices, and exposure to academic content (2020, background): “These entry skills are important; once children start behind, it is difficult to catch up (Heckman & Kautz, 2013; Reardon, 2011).”
Teaching teenagers in finance: does it work? (2015, background): “Both are highly predictive of human capital accumulation and important for later life financial outcomes (Heckman and Kautz, 2013).”
The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility (2014, unknown): “This feature is consistent with a large body of evidence reviewed below that later life remediation is generally less effective than early life prevention and investment (Cunha et al., 2006; Heckman and Kautz, 2014; Knudsen et al., 2006; Sroufe et al., 2005).”
Fostering Patience in the Classroom: Results from Randomized Educational Intervention (2018, background): “However, the main channel seems to be enhanced noncognitive skills rather than cognition; seeHeckman,Humphries, andKautz (2014),Heckman and Kautz (2014), and the references therein for an extensive review of these interventions.”
2017-03 Early and Late Human Capital Investments, Borrowing Constraints, and the Family (2012, unknown): “For broader surveys, see Karoly et al. (1998), Blau and Currie (2006), Cunha, et al. (2006), Almond and Currie (2011), Heckman and Kautz (2014), Kautz et al. (2014).”