The cognitive hypothesis vs noncognitive skills
"Tools of the Mind, by contrast, doesn't focus much on reading and math abiities. Instead, all of its interventions are intended to help children learn a different kind of skill: controlling their impulses, staying focused on the task at hand, avoiding distractions and mental traps, managing their emotions, organizing their thoughts." P. xii
"...evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypotheses." P. xv
"What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence." P. xv
"Which skills and traits lead to success? How do they develop in childhood? And what kind of interventions might help children do better?" P. xvii
GED is NOT equal to HS Diploma.....
"But when Heckman looked at their path through higher education, he discovered that GED recipients weren't anything like high-school graduates. At age twenty-two, Heckman found, just 3 percent of GED recipients were enrolled in a four-year university or had completed some kind of post-secondary degree, compared to 46 percent of high-school graduates. In fact, Heckman discovered that when you consider all kinds of important future outcomes - annual income, unemployment rate, divorce rate, use of illegal drugs - GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact that they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropouts." P. xviii
"Now he had discovered a group - GED holders - whose good test scores didn't seem to have any positive effect on their lives.
What was missing from the equation, Heckman concluded, were the psychological traits that had allowed the high-school graduates to make it through school. Those traits - an inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task; the ability to delay gratification; the tendency to follow through on a plan - also turned out to be valuable in college, in the workplace, and in life generally. As Heckman explained in one paper: "Inadvertently, the GED has become a test that separates bright but nonpersistent and undisciplined dropouts from other dropouts." GED holders, he wrote, "are 'wise guys' who lack the ability to think aheas, persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments."' P. xiv
My summary/thoughts:
The cognitive hypothesis views knowledge, IQ as the predictor of success. However, there is mounting evidence that success is based more on noncognitive skills such as persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence.
If the noncognitive hypothesis is correct, what do we need to do to help students persist in learning and receiving a high-school diploma? How are we preventing the development of these characteristics when we continue to give students chance after chance to make up missed deadlines? I agree that some students really need longer to learn the material, but I know that most students waste the time they are given and fail to meet deadlines because they are simply not disciplined.
