Education Next – Jay P. Greene
“Anna Egalite, Jonathan Mills, and I have a new study in the journal Improving Schools in which we administer multiple measures of “non-cognitive” skills to the same sample of students to see if we get consistent results. We didn’t. How students performed on a self-reported grit scale was uncorrelated with behavioral measures of character skills, like delayed gratification, time devoted to solving a challenging task, and item non-response. These are all meant to capture related (although not identical) concepts, so they should correlate with each other. The fact that they don’t suggests that we still have a lot of work to do to refine our understanding of character skills and how best to measure them. Angela Duckworth, who developed the self-reported grit scale, and David Scott Yeager, who is a pioneer in measuring growth-mindset, have been trying to warn the field that these measures are still in their infancy. They have an article in Educational Researcher and have been giving interviews emphasizing that while non-cog skills appear to be a very important part of later life success, our methods of measuring these concepts are still not very strong — certainly not strong enough to include in school accountability systems.”(more)