Measures of the heart: non-cognitive skills tests
Being smart isn’t all you need to succeed.
Non-cognitive or meta-cognitive skills such as self-awareness, self-control, empathy, communication and cooperation are as important or even more important to long-term success than cognitive factors like math and reading ability. The evidence is undeniable, but US school assessment and accountability systems are currently limited to measures of cognitive skills alone. If schools don’t measure non-cognitive skills, it is difficult to prioritize them.
There are several emerging attempts to measure non-cognitive skills, aka Mindsets & Essential Skills and Habits (MESH) in schools. Most use the simplest instrument available: self-reporting surveys.
- The OECD gives the Program in International Assessment or PISA to about half a million students around the world. It’s widely publicized for its rankings on math and language achievement. But in addition to the two hours of word problems or essay questions, PISA students also complete a 30-minute questionnaire asking about things like self-efficacy, self-esteem, student-teacher relationships, and the school climate, making it one of the largest attempts to measure non-cognitive skills in the world. An infographic published on the website Buzzfeed based on PISA data sorted countries about evenly into four quadrants: happiest and least happy kids, and high and low test scores. Korea stands out for its miserable kids and high scores, Singapore has the happiest kids with the highest scores, Qatar and Argentina have sad, low-scoring kids and Peru and Indonesia are whistling away their weak scores. (The US falls into the unhappy, low-scoring bottom left quadrant.)
School leaders around the world are using PISA findings on the emotional health of their students. In Korea, in February 2013 the new president Park Geun-hye announced that the happiness of citizens would become a national priority, and the Ministry of Education has taken this up as a goal.
- In 2012 almost 500,000 students across the US in grades 5-12 completed the Gallup Student Poll,