Hard evidence on soft skills.

This paper summarizes recent evidence on what achievement tests measure; how achievement tests relate to other measures of "cognitive ability" like IQ and grades; the important skills that achievement tests miss or mismeasure, and how much these skills matter in life. Achievement tests miss, or perhaps more accurately, do not adequately capture, soft skills-personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. The larger message of this paper is that soft skills predict success in life, that they causally produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Labour Economics

• Publication date

  2012-08-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Economics, Education, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/J.LABECO.2012.05.014PMID 23559694PMCID PMC3612993
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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