This report provides a collection and analysis of research about instruments designed to measure "non-cognitive factors," i.e. skills and dispositions toward learning, in students as they transition from late childhood to adolescence

This article describes how from a young age, attitudes toward learning play a large role in one's success in school and life. A person's theory about intelligence, i.e. whether one has what is known as a "growth" or a "fixed" mindset, is particularly important when facing failure, as people who believe they can improve their basic abilities are more resilient in the face of challenges and mistakes.

This article describes a one-year ethnographic study of a kindergarten classroom of 25 middle- and working-class white, African-American, and Latino children in which students' "smartness" as defined by the teacher was related to their prior knowledge of taught material and classroom behavior expectations, rather than evidence of academic ability. The article highlights the problematic nature for students when determinations of "smartness" are made based on teachers' expectations mediated by knowledge of students' socioeconomic backgrounds and racial identities.

Researchers have been focusing for years on personal qualities other than cognitive ability that determine success, including self-control, grit, growth mind-set, and many others. In recent years, interest in attempting to measure such qualities for the purposes of educational policy and practice has grown - this article identifies the problematic challenges in measuring these qualities within the education arena. 

From Fantasy to Action: Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) Improves Academic Performance in Children

This article describes a research intervention that tested whether a metacognitive self-regulatory strategy of goal pursuit can help economically disadvantaged children convert positive thoughts and images about their future into effective action. The technique used in the intervention, called mental contrasting (MCII), was shown to significantly improve academic outcomes for students, suggesting that it holds considerable promise for helping disadvantaged middle school children improve their academic performance. Mental contrasting entails envisioning a desired future with relevant obstacles and forming implementation intentions specifying when and where to overcome those obstacles.

In this article, Carol Dweck identifies and defines two sets of beliefs that people can have about intelligence: fixed mindset and growth mindset. She argues that educators and administrators must understand that intelligence is fluid and that students can learn to have a growth mindset, citing recent research that shows that students' mindsets have a direct influence on their grades and that teaching students to have a growth mindset raises their grades and achievement test scores significantly. In addition, studies demonstrate that having a growth mindset is especially important for students who are laboring under negative stereotypes about their abilities.

This paper explains how motivational or "noncognitive" factors can be more important than cognitive factors for student academic performance.The research reviewed in this paper shows that educational interventions and initiatives that target these psychological factors can transform students’ experience and achievement in school, improving core academic outcomes such as GPA and test scores months and even years later. 

This seminal literature review by the UChicago Consortium on School Research shows that academic mindsets and behaviors, so-called "noncognitive factors," have the most immediate effect on students’ course grades. While some students are more likely to persist in tasks or exhibit self-discipline than others, research shows student mindsets and academic behaviors are teachable, and that all students are more likely to demonstrate perseverance if the school or classroom context helps them develop positive mindsets and effective learning strategies.

In this interview with Angela Duckworth, a leading researcher on motivation, she describes what her research has shown about the relationship between grit and achievement, and she reflects on the importance of helping students develop grit and other "noncognitive" factors.

Since 1995, social psychologists have shown that among the many obstacles black and Latino students face in an academic setting is a psychological one, something referred to as "stereotype threat." This article describes a simple psychological intervention that research has shown can narrow the test-score differences caused by stereotype threat.

This research based overview outlines the core problems, concepts, and theory of action underlying student academic mindsets and learning strategies and their connection to academic achievement. The review summarizes trends and highlights promising interventions and tools that educators serving low income students and students of color particularly African American and Latino students might adapt to their local contexts in order to help their students engage, persist, and succeed in school and beyond.

Three decades have passed since the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck and others first linked students' motivation to the way they perceived intelligence. Students who believe intelligence or skill can be improved by effort and experimentation—what Dweck calls a "growth mindset"—seek challenges, learn from mistakes, and keep faith in themselves in the face of failure. This article describes the efforts of schools working to support growth mindsets in students, and their impact.

In this article, Carol Dweck and David Yeager, leading researchers on student motivation, review research demonstrating the impact of students' mindsets on their resilience in the face of academic and social challenges. They demonstrate that students who believe - or are taught - that intellectual abilities are qualities that can be developed (as opposed to qualities that are fixed) tend to show higher achievement across challenging school transitions and greater course completion, as well as lower aggression and stress in response to peer victimization or exclusion, which results in enhanced school performance. They discuss why psychological interventions that change students' mindsets are effective and what educators can do to foster these mindsets and create resilience in educational settings.

Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” social-psychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ psychology, such as their beliefs that they have the potential to improve their intelligence or that they belong and are valued in school. When social-psychological interventions have lasting effects, it can seem surprising and even “magical,” leading people either to think of them as quick fixes to complicated problems or to consider them unworthy of serious consideration. This article discourages both responses, presenting a review of the theoretical basis of several prominent social-psychological interventions and emphasizing that they have lasting effects because they target students’ subjective experiences in school, because they use persuasive yet stealthy methods for conveying psychological ideas, and because they tap into recursive processes present in educational environments. The authors explain that by understanding psychological interventions as powerful but context-dependent tools, educational researchers will be better equipped to take them to scale. The review concludes by discussing challenges to scaling psychological interventions and how these challenges may be overcome.

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Many important learning tasks feel uninteresting and tedious to learners. This paper describes four research studies that proposed that promoting a prosocial, self-transcendent purpose could improve academic self-regulation on such tasks. The studies found that students with more of a purpose for learning persisted longer on a boring task rather than giving in to a tempting alternative and, many months later, were less likely to drop out of college. They also showed that a brief, one-time psychological intervention promoting a self-transcendent purpose for learning could improve high school science and math grade point average over several months, could increase deeper learning behavior on tedious test review materials, and sustain self-regulation over the course of an increasingly boring task. More self-oriented motives for learning - such as the desire to have an interesting or enjoyable career - did not, on their own, consistently produce these benefits.

This paper describes three studies that looked at the effects of a strategy to restore trust on minority adolescents’ responses to critical feedback. Middle school students received critical feedback from their teacher that was designed to assuage mistrust by emphasizing the teacher’s high standards and belief that the student was capable of meeting those standards—a strategy known as wise feedback. Wise feedback increased students’ likelihood of submitting a revision of an essay and improved the quality of their final drafts. Effects were generally stronger among African American students than among White students, and particularly strong among African Americans who felt more mistrusting of school. Among this latter group of students, the 2-year decline in trust evident in the control condition was, in the wise feedback condition, halted. The interventions in the studies raised African Americans’ grades, reducing the achievement gap.