Advantages Of Non-Cognitive Abilities

According to the article “Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes,” scholars, practitioners, and the lay public have become to focus on measuring and changing qualities, non-cognitive qualities, other than cognitive ability. Non-cognitive qualities include self-control, beliefs, and skills. More schools need to reconsider “grit”, which is the diligence and passion for long-term goals. Besides, cognitive ability cannot lead to student success, but personal qualities can do it. Personal qualities are usually approached by performance tasks, self-report, and teacher-report questionnaires. Even though questionnaires are dependable and quick in many cases, performance tasks still are …show more content…
Some schools begin to interest on the new teaching method, grit; however, grit needs more valid research that can verify its success. Schools should reconsider the belief in the new teaching method, which is grit. Non-cognitive abilities can be divided into two types of measures: questionnaires and performance tasks. Questionnaires are very easy to manage and provide consistent results; however, questionnaires are very susceptible to problems that can affect the outcomes, including misinterpretation by participant, lack of insight or information, insensitivity to short-term changes, the frame of reference, and faking and social desirability bias (Duckworth, Yeager 239). On the other hand, performance tasks allow researcher to receive a careful results basing on different individuals. Performance tasks still have some limitations that influence the validity of the measurement such as misinterpretation by researcher, insensitivity to typical behavior, task impurity, artificial situations, practice effects, extraneous situational influences, and random error (Duckworth, Yeager 239). The validity of the measure incident to itself but rather is related to the academic use. Currently, the limitation of non-cognitive measures may produce negative results and imprudent effect for accountability. Performance tasks and questionnaires are lack of trustworthy quality to use for academic purposes. Furthermore, performance tasks and questionnaires still may be helpful for the development of the potential of non-cognitive measures due to some of their