On the interpretation of non-cognitive skills – what is being measured and why it matters

John Humphries and Fabian Kosse

No 2016-025, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Across academic sub-fields such as labor, education, and behavioral economics, the measurement and interpretation of non-cognitive skills varies widely. As a result, it is difficult to compare results on the importance of non-cognitive skills across literatures. Drawing from these literatures, this paper systematically relates various prototypical non-cognitive measures within one data set. Specifically, we estimate and compare several different strategies for measuring non-cognitive skills. For each, we compare their relative effectiveness at predicting educational success and decompose what is being measured into underlying personality traits and economic preferences. We demonstrate that the construction of the non-cognitive factor greatly influences what is actually measured and what conclusions are reached about the role of non-cognitive skills in life outcomes such as educational attainment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, while sometimes difficult to interpret, factors extracted from self-reported behaviors can have predictive power similar to well established taxonomies, such as the Big Five.

Keywords: non-cognitive skills; personality; preferences; educational success (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D90 I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-ltv and nep-neu
Note: IP, MIP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Humphr ... g-skills-measure.pdf First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2016-025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().