This book provides an overview of recent research on the relationship between noncognitive attributes (motivation, self efficacy, resilience) and academic outcomes (such as grades or test scores). We focus primarily on how these sets of attributes are measured and how they relate to important academic outcomes. Noncognitive attributes are those academically and occupationally relevant skills and traits that are not “cognitive”—that is, not specifically intellectual or analytical in nature. We examine seven attributes in depth and critique the measurement approaches used by researchers and talk about how they can be improved.

Over the past few decades, US business and industry have been transformed by the advances and redundancies produced by the knowledge economy. The workplace has changed, and much of the work differs from that performed by previous generations. Can human capital accumulation in the United States keep pace with the evolving demands placed on it, and how can the workforce of tomorrow acquire the skills and competencies that are most in demand? Education, Skills, and Technical Change explores various facets of these questions and provides an overview of educational attainment in the United States and the channels through which labor force skills and education affect GDP growth. Contributors to this volume focus on a range of educational and training institutions and bring new data to bear on how we understand the role of college and vocational education and the size and nature of the skills gap. This work links a range of research areas—such as growth accounting, skill development, higher education, and immigration—and also examines how well students are being prepared for the current and future world of work.

These articles include recent research on ways to incorporate the noncognitive side of ability in economic theory and to empirically assess and explain its role in labor market and behavioral outcomes. Contributions investigate the extent to which assignment of workers is determined by traditional cognitive variables and by personality traits. Also presented in this collection is research on the role of noncognitive skills in explaining the labor market position of underrepresented groups and research that integrates the economic and psychological theory and evidence on noncognitive skills.

"Non-cognitive skills" are often used to refers to those skills that do not fall within the cognitive category but to describe a stable pattern of thought, feeling, and behavior in different situations and backgrounds with profitable and investable characteristics, such as conscientiousness, perseverance, and teamwork, which are critically important in education. However, for many years, "non-cognitive skills" have always been ignored in human capital theory. The book, using a multidisciplinary approach, tries to uncover the noncognitive components of human capital, so as to answer the question "what is the skill that should be invested in?" The author expands the connotations of human capital by exploring the value of noncognitive skills and their production patterns, constructing a measurement framework and a set of tools to measure noncognitive skills. She especially carries out an empirical survey which covers primary and secondary school students from seven provinces of China’s east, middle, and west areas. With the data collected, she analyzes Chinese students’ noncognitive development and further identifies the critical factors that may impact their noncognitive skills by applying the Bayesian Model Average approach. The book will be a theoretical contribution to education economics. Researchers interested in education in China, children’s development, and policymakers in the field of education will find this book helpful and resourceful.

More than ever, the economic health of a country depends upon the skills, knowledge, and capacities of its people. How does a person acquire these human assets and how can we promote their development? Securing the Future assembles an interdisciplinary team of scholars to investigate the full range of factors—pediatric, psychological, social, and economic—that bear on a child's development into a well-adjusted, economically productive member of society. A central purpose of the volume is to identify sound interventions that will boost human assets, particularly among the disadvantaged. The book provides a comprehensive evaluation of current initiatives and offers a wealth of new suggestions for effective public and private investments in child development. While children from affluent, highly educated families have good quality child care and an expensive education provided for them, children from poor families make do with informal child care and a public school system that does not always meet their needs. How might we best redress this growing imbalance? The contributors to this volume recommend policies that treat academic attainment together with psychological development and social adjustment. Mentoring programs, for example, promote better school performance by first fostering a young person's motivation to learn. Investments made early in life, such as preschool education, are shown to have the greatest impact on later learning for the least cost. In their focus upon children, however, the authors do not neglect the important links between generations. Poverty and inequality harm the development of parents and children alike. Interventions that empower parents to fight for better services and better schools are also of great benefit to their children. Securing the Future shows how investments in child development are both a means to an end and an end in themselves. They benefit the child directly and they also help that child contribute to the well-being of society. This book points us toward more effective strategies for promoting the economic success and the social cohesion of future generations. A Volume in the Ford Foundation Series on Asset Building

Uruguay faces medium- and long-term challenges associated with two global megatrends: population aging and technological change. These two megatrends have been developing for some time, but policy responses have been late or inadequate in many cases. Trying to delay them--by promoting higher fertility or enforcing restrictions on the adoption of new technologies--would probably be ineffective but also ill-advised, as these trends are generating important opportunities to increase production and welfare. The objective of this book is to identify these opportunities, as well as the challenges that population aging and technological change pose for the Uruguayan economy and to determine how they can be addressed through better-designed public policies, with a focus on the development of new skills that increase workers’ productivity.