The Hard Evidence on Soft Skills

By Alexandra Solano

Associate, Report Cards Program

With Scott Odell, Program Assistant

James J. Heckman argues that education systems

should place a more significant emphasis on soft

skills such as character and personality traits.

Image from the Heckman website.

In December, Professor James J. Heckman gave a lecture at the World Bank in Washington, DC, entitled “Hard Evidence on Soft Skills”, in which he asserted that an emphasis on hard skills (such as knowledge in math, science and reading) at the expense of soft skills (such as character and personality traits) has unfortunate implications for education policy.

Heckman, a Nobel Laureate economist from the University of Chicago, claimed that soft skills are often interpreted as being “fuzzy” concepts that are difficult to quantify, and under this assumption, researchers and policymakers place little attention on the role of character or personality traits in predicting success in life. In fact, however, psychologists and economists have reached significant consensus on defining the most important soft skills and have developed accurate tools for measuring them. 

Winners Announced for PREAL’s Fourth Education Research Fund Competition

The theme of the Fourth Competition was

“The teacher as a key actor for improving

education." Image Source: Wikimedia

Commons.

The Education Research Fund (FIE), a program coordinated by PREAL with the Support of USAID, recently announced the nine research proposals that have been selected for funding as part of the fourth research competition, which had as its theme, “The teacher as a key actor for improving education.”

The FIE received 75 proposals from researchers in 16 countries, each of which was reviewed independently by two academic evaluators. PREAL then convened a panel composed of Pablo Gonzáles, Michael Johanek, Patrick McEwan, and Robert Myers, who used the evaluations to select the final winners, in collaboration with PREAL’s co-directors and the executive secretary of FIE, Santiago Cueto. 

Study: Teachers' "Value-added" has Life-long Impact

By Jeffrey Puryear

PREAL Co-director

Image from the New York Times article "Big Study Links

Good Teachers to Lasting Gain.”

Following up on the article we shared last week on the value-added approach to teacher evaluation in Washington, DC, a recent New York Times article, along with a column by Nicholas Kristof, report on a new study that examines whether the value-added approach effectively distinguishes between good and bad teachers, and how much impact those teachers have on students. After tracking 1 million students over 20 years, the authors concluded that 1) value-added approaches accurately measure teacher quality over time, and 2) students of teachers with high value-added scores were subsequently more successful in many dimensions, including attending college, earning higher salaries, and avoiding teenage pregnancy.

Washington Proposes Making Great Teachers Rich

By Jeffrey Puryear

PREAL Co-director

Washington DC’s new Impact Plus program

employs the value-added approach to teacher pay

by rewarding high-performing teachers – like Tiffany

Johnson, above – with large bonuses and raises.

Image from the New York Times article “In

Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay.”

 “We want to make great teachers rich.” This quote, by the chief of the Office of Human Capital of Washington DC’s public school system, summarizes the district’s new value-added approach to teacher compensation. The Impact Plus program rewards teachers with bonuses of between $2,400 and $25,000 if their students learn more than would be expected based on previous test scores. Consistently high performance merits permanent raises, and annual remuneration can reach as high as $130,000. In a recent New York Times article, Sam Dillon provides several examples of how the program appears to be achieving its intended objective.

PISA Scores for 10 new Education Systems Announced

By Alexandra Solano

Associate, Report Cards Program

With Katie Hufnagel and Scott Odell, Program Assistants

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) just released the document “PISA 2009 Plus Results: Performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science for 10 additional participants,” which presents results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for countries that participated after the initial round of examinations. The new participants include two Latin American education systems: Costa Rica and Venezuela’s Miranda Province. It is relevant to note that Miranda-Venezuela did not meet the PISA standard on schools response rate, and that Himachal Pradesh-India and Tamil Nadu-India did not meet PISA standards for student sampling, so caution should be exercised when interpreting results from these education systems. 

Mean Scores on PISA Reading Test, 2009

Key: Dark blue: LAC; Green: Second Round Countries; Red: Costa Rica and Venezuela-Miranda

Sources: OECD (2010) and ACER (2011). Note: Not all differences between countries are statistically significant.

In August, PREAL summarized the first round of PISA results in “Measuring Up? How Latin America and the Caribbean Performed on the 2009 PISA.” We were curious whether the performance of Costa Rica and Miranda-Venezuela would follow the trend of the nine Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries that participated previously. Here are some key observations from the new results: