Strategies to promote non-cognitive skills in youth

Posted by Public Profit on July 21, 2014

Strategies to promote non-cognitive skills

A guide for youth developers and educators

This Guide profiles sixteen options for youth development organizations and schools to promote non-cognitive skills among those they serve. It is designed to help youth developers and educators make comparisons between multiple strategies that exist to foster non-cognitive skills in children and youth.

Recent research suggests that non-cognitive skills – the strategies, attitudes, and behaviors youth use inside and outside of the classroom – are critical to young people’s success in school and the workplace. Commonly cited examples of non-cognitive skills
include tenacity, optimism, self-regulation, and metacognition.

Many of these skills are a natural fit for out of school time settings, including after-school and summer programs. They can be cultivated in young people through multiple means, and are not dependent on specific academic content knowledge among staff, as is the case with more traditional academic skill development activities. Moreover, available evidence suggests that non-cognitive skill development is deeply dependent on a positive learning environment, which closely mirrors positive youth development principles.

The research on non-cognitive factors is just emerging. The current literature therefore has the “Jingle/Jangle” problem, that is, the inconsistent terminology used to refer to non-cognitive factors. For the sake of clarity, we adopt the terminology presented in a recent report from the University of Chicago in our discussion of non-cognitive factors.

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