MacArthur Award winner and CASBS Consulting Scholar Angela Duckworth and Mindset Scholars Network(MSN) Co-Chair and CASBS Fellow David Yeager concluded the 2014-15 CASBS Symposium Series with a presentation on “The Psychology of Effort.”
This and other CASBS videos can be viewed on the CASBS You Tube channel.
The Mindset Scholars’ research shows that students who believe they can get smarter, that they belong in school, and that their schoolwork is relevant to their lives and a purpose that is bigger than themselves are more motivated to take on challenging work, persist in the face of setbacks, and achieve at higher levels. Students develop these mindsets about learning and school over time from the messages they pick up from society, their interactions with others, and their previous educational experiences.
However in a recently published article in Education Researcher, Duckworth and Yeager draw attention to the ways in which non-cognitive measures used in psychological research can be misapplied in education policy and practice. An ever-increasing audience of researchers, educators, policy makers, and parents are following research on self-control, grit, growth mindset, emotional intelligence, social belonging, and other non-cognitive aspects of academic success. Practitioners and policy makers are interested in applying lessons from this research in schools and classrooms to improve student outcomes. A recent area of emphasis is the measurement of these qualities for educational purposes, such as school accountability.
In “Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes,” Duckworth and Yeager call for caution by policy makers and practitioners eager to apply measures of students’ non-cognitive skills that were originally developed for research for purposes of educational assessment and evaluation. “Measures developed for very good research purposes do not necessarily translate into… very important educational purposes,” said Yeager in the American Educational Research Association’s interview with the authors. In the article, Duckworth (University of Pennsylvania), and Yeager (University of Texas at Austin) explain why widely used measurement tools in non-cognitive research— questionnaires and performance tasks—should be evaluated carefully before being applied to other uses in education. In particular, they contend that existing measures should not be used to rate individual students’ non-cognitive qualities, assess educators, or judge schools for purposes of accountability. “Our review says there is little or no scientific evidence that this should be done, and much evidence that this will be misleading,” said Yeager. Instead of adopting these measures in their current form for such purposes, the authors suggest medium-term R&D investments “that may in the future make measures of these personal qualities more suitable for educational purposes.” “We share this more expansive view of student competence and well-being, but we also believe that enthusiasm for these factors should be tempered with appreciation for the many limitations of currently available measures,” the authors wrote. Duckworth and Yeager “urge practitioners, policymakers, and funders to bear in mind the particular limitations and advantages of the measures that have been developed for research purposes, and to invest in the R&D and training necessary to yield measures and measurement practices that will empower those seeking to cultivate these important qualities in students.” Duckworth and Yeager see particular promise in adapting existing non-cognitive measures for use by program evaluators and individual educators for purposes of instructional improvement. A research brief on the article issued by the Mindset Scholars Network (link to brief) recommends that practitioners, researchers, and program evaluators collaborate on five key tasks that will help unlock the potential of non-cognitive measures for these purposes:
- Optimizing existing questionnaires for purposes of practice improvement;
- Developing a set of brief, online performance tasks for program evaluation;
- Integrating seamless measurement and reporting into popular online platforms
- used by educators;
- Developing a web-based non-cognitive measurement repository and reporting tool for educators; and,
- Increasing educators’ facility with practical measurement and the interpretation of data on non-cognitive measures so that educators can use this information to improve their classroom practice.