Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Self-reports of one's general intellectual humility provide numerous opportunities for error.
“Thus, self- reports of one's general intellectual humility provides numerous opportunities for error 45,46 .”
From Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility (2022) · cites this paper as [46]
The Self-Report and Teacher-Report Questionnaires section describes several opportunities for error in reporting personal qualities, including errors in recall, reference bias, and edited responses. It does not address intellectual humility specifically, so the application to that quality goes beyond what the paper states. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredUsing school fixed effects minimizes the possibility of reference bias in self-reported measures.
“Another important benefit of using school fixed effects is that this approach minimizes the possibility of reference bias in our self-reported measures (West et al., 2016; Duckworth & Yeager, 2015).”
From Teacher and Teaching Effects on Students’ Attitudes and Behaviors (2017) · cites this paper as Duckworth & Yeager, 2015
The Program Evaluation section says that within-school comparisons may hold the frame of reference constant for teacher reports, while between-school comparisons of self- and teacher-reports may be biased. It does not discuss school fixed effects or establish that they minimize reference bias in self-reports; the Self-Report and Teacher-Report Questionnaires section also notes that reference bias can occur between grades within one school. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
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Experience-Sampling Research Methods and Their Potential for Education Research
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Can 1st-Year College Students Accurately Report Their Learning and Development?
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Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life
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Success in College: The Role of Personal Qualities and Academic Ability
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Target Article: "The Really Fundamental Attribution Error in Social Psychological Research"
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Personality psychology of situations
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Jackson, C. K. (2012) · National Bureau of Economic Research · doi:10.3386/w18624 · Cited by 154 · see citing works
Can Student Surveys Measure Teaching Quality?
Ferguson, R. F. (2012) · Phi Delta Kappan · doi:10.1177/003172171209400306 · Cited by 149 · see citing works
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Measuring 21st Century Competencies: Guidance for Educators
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Rational temporal predictions can underlie apparent failures to delay gratification
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Domain-Specific Impulsivity in School-Age Children
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Self-citationGalla, B. M., Plummer, B. D., White, R. E., Meketon, D., D’Mello, S. K., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014) · Contemporary Educational Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2014.08.001 · Cited by 106 · see citing works
Self-citationYour Friends Know How Long You Will Live: A 75-Year Study of Peer-Rated Personality Traits
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POPULAR LECTURES AND ADDRESSES
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Individual Differences in Cognition: New Methods for Examining the Personality-Cognition Link
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The Utility and Need for Incorporating Noncognitive Skills Into Large-Scale Educational Assessments
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Personality Measurement and Assessment in Large Panel Surveys
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Self-citationTHE ROLE OF POWER IN THE ADOPTION OF SEF-REWARD PATTERNS
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Self-citation(Over and) beyond high-stakes testing.
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Self-citationFaking in Personality Assessments
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Landscape Analysis of Non-Cognitive MeasuresPreprint
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Flagged first, then by citations
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
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Self-citationTeacher and Teaching Effects on Students’ Attitudes and Behaviors
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Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view
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Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility
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Cognitive and noncognitive predictors of success
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Intellectual humility predicts mastery behaviors when learning
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- Authors
- Duckworth, A. L., & Yeager, D. S.
- Affiliations
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- Venue
- Educational Researcher
- Published
- 2015-05
- Volume
- 44
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 237-251
- ISSN
- 0013-189X (ISSN-L)
- 1935-102X
- PMC
- PMC4849415
- OpenAlex
- W1853636458
- Cited by
- 993
- References
- 166
- Citations by year
- 2026: 63 · 2025: 80 · 2024: 89 · 2023: 93 · 2022: 99 · 2021: 100 · 2020: 133 · 2019: 101 · 2018: 82 · 2017: 75 · 2016: 63 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 126.37
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Educational Researcher (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Aging (R24AG048081, K01AG033182)
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD042849)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Grit, Self-Efficacy, and Motivation
- Social Sciences › Education › Early Childhood Education and Development
- Social Sciences › Education › School Choice and Performance
- Keywords
- non-cognitive skills, self-control, grit, self-report questionnaire, teacher reports, performance tasks, program evaluation, school accountability, education policy
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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