Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes

By Angela L. Duckworth, D. Yeager. Educational Research, 2015

979 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There has been perennial interest in personal qualities other than cognitive ability that determine success, including self-control, grit, growth mind-set, and many others. Attempts to measure such qualities for the purposes of educational policy and practice, however, are more recent. In this article, we identify serious challenges to doing so. We first address confusion over terminology, including the descriptor noncognitive. We conclude that debate over the optimal name for this broad category of personal qualities obscures substantial agreement about the specific attributes worth measuring. Next, we discuss advantages and limitations of different measures. In particular, we compare self-report questionnaires, teacher-report questionnaires, and performance tasks, using self-control as an illustrative case study to make the general point that each approach is imperfect in its own way. Finally, we discuss how each measure’s imperfections can affect its suitability for program evaluation, accountability, individual diagnosis, and practice improvement. For example, we do not believe any available measure is suitable for between-school accountability judgments. In addition to urging caution among policymakers and practitioners, we highlight medium-term innovations that may make measures of these personal qualities more suitable for educational purposes.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2026b77160ccf59f26dc9946d79b718c336bd77

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Citations in the corpus

The Role of Grit in Education: A Systematic Review (2018, background): “Such qualities have been found to positively impact academic outcomes, social relationships, as well as psychological and physical well-being (Duckworth & Gross, 2014; Duckworth & Yeager, 2015).”
Social and Emotional Learning: A Principled Science of Human Development in Context (2019, neutral): “A common approach to SEL measurement involves the use of student surveys, although concerns have been raised about their psychometric properties and their potential for misuse in high-stakes contexts (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015).”
Using Design Thinking to Improve Psychological Interventions: The Case of the Growth Mindset During the Transition to High School (2016, background): “This may make it a practical proxy outcome in future evaluation of interventions (see Duckworth & Yeager, 2015; Yeager & Bryk, 2015).”
Social and emotional skills for student success and well-being: Conceptual framework for the OECD study on social and emotional skills (2018, neutral): “The term “trait”, on the other hand, which has often been used, seems to connote a false sense of immutability (Duckworth and Yeager, 2015[31]; Heckman and Kautz, 2012[38]).”
Measurement Schmeasurement: Questionable Measurement Practices and How to Avoid Them (2020, methodology): “Resources in those areas are abundant, and we have curated a list of them on OSF (Fried & Flake, 2020).”
On the (im)possibility of fairness (2016, neutral): “The ability to measure grit and these other qualities precisely is limited [7].”
Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view (2018, background): “Self-report ratings, though often predictive of actual behavior, are vulnerable to reporting biases (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015).”
Reconceptualizing the Sources of Teaching Self-Efficacy: a Critical Review of Emerging Literature (2016, neutral): “Moreover, different referential biases, such as school setting, can make it difficult to compare ratings across contexts (see Duckworth and Yeager 2015).”
Rethinking Traditional Methods of Survey Validation (2017, background): “Duckworth and Yeager (2015) define self-control as “the regulation of attention, emotion, and behavior when enduringly valued goals conflict with more immediately pleasurable temptations” (p. 239).10 Although this definition is articulate and may be useful for many purposes, one can immediately…”
Perseverant grit and self-efficacy: Are both essential for children’s academic success? (2019, neutral): “T hi s ar tic le is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. observable (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015).”
Assessment framework of the OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills (2019, neutral): “However, every aspect of mental functioning is based on some form of information processing and cognition (Duckworth and Yeager, 2015[20]).”
Understanding Student Self-Reports of Academic Performance and Course-Taking Behavior (2017, background): “The second can occur with any survey question that asks about potentially embarrassing information, with some respondents altering the response to give the socially desirable answer (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015.)”
Psychosocial Factors and Community College Student Success (2017, background): “Variables of this nature, also called psychosocial or noncognitive factors (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015; Farrington et al., 2012), have been shown to be highly predictive of postsecondary student success (Richardson, Abraham, & Bond, 2012).”