Social And Emotional Skills: Everybody Loves Them, But Still Can’t Define Them

NPR:

More and more, people in education agree on the importance of schools’ paying attention to stuff other than academics.

But still, no one agrees on what to call that “stuff.”

I originally published a story on this topic two years ago.

As I reported back then, there were a bunch of overlapping terms in play, from “character” to “grit” to “noncognitive skills.”

This bagginess bugged me, as a member of the education media. It bugged researchers and policymakers too. It still does.

If anything, the case for nonacademics has gotten even stronger since then. In fact, it has been enshrined in federal law. The Every Student Succeeds Act mandates that states measure at least one nonacademic indicator of school success.

…

Grit is a pioneer virtue with a long American history — think of the classic Western True Grit. When Angela Duckworth was working on her dissertation in the mid-2000s, she chose the term to encapsulate the measures of self-control, persistence and conscientiousness that she was finding to be powerful determinants of success. It quickly caught on — maybe too quickly, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist told me.

Read the whole story: NPR