Cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and family background: evidence from sibling correlations

Literacy Skills, Non-Cognitive Skills and Earnings: An Economist’s Perspective

Targeting non-cognitive skills to improve cognitive outcomes: evidence from a remedial education intervention

Targeting Non-Cognitive Skills to Improve Cognitive Outcomes: Evidence from a Remedial Education Intervention A growing body of research highlights the importance of non-cognitive skills as determinants of young people’s cognitive outcomes at school. However, little evidence exists about the effects of policies that specifically target students’ non-cognitive skills as a way to improve educatio...

Can video games affect children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills?∗

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether there is a causal relationship between video game playing and children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. According to the literature, video games have a potential to improve children’s cognitive abilities. Video games may also positively affect such non-cognitive skills as the ability to sustain attention and pro-social behavior. On the other ...

Hard Skills, Soft Skills: The Relative Roles of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills in Intergenerational Social Mobility

In this article, we adopt a two-step strategy to assess the relative roles of cognitive and noncognitive skills in mediating the relationship between family SES and children’s academic achievement using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. First, we decompose the total effects of family background on children’s achievement into: (1) direct effects of family back...

Cognitive Skills among Children in Senegal: Disentangling the Roles of Schooling and Family Background

We use unique data to estimate the determinants of cognitive ability among 14 to 17 year olds in Senegal. Unlike standard school-based samples, tests were administered to current students as well as to children no longer—or never—enrolled. Years of schooling strongly affects cognitive skills, but conditional on years of school, parental education and household wealth, as well as local public sc...