Importance of Non-cognitive Factors

There's emerging consensus in educational research that non-cognitive factors can profoundly affect student learning.

We hope to demonstrate this to you in the coming sessions, including ways that you can incorporate what we cover into your teaching.

We'll do so through a model created in 2012 by a group of researchers and practitioners affiliated with the University of Chicago, led by Camille Farrington.

It's informed by a comprehensive literature review on the role of non-cognitive factors in shaping school performance.

The model conceptualizes the relationships among each of those factors, as well as their ultimate relationship to academic performance.

So, let's take a look.

Near the bottom of the diagram is an orange box labeled academic behaviors.

This represents the student behaviors we're used to observing and hopefully eliciting in our classrooms.

Things like consistently attending class, arriving prepared and on time, paying attention, mindfully engaging class activities and doing homework.

In other words, this is the stuff of learning and what it means to be a good student.

Academic behaviors are in turn influenced by the other factors you see in this model.

Together they help determine students' academic performance and how well they do in school.

Next, the most broadly influential factor in this model is academic mindsets.

As you'll recall from the last session, mindsets encompass beliefs that students bring to their learning.

Here again are some statements that capture them.

I belong in this academic community.

My ability and competence grow with my effective effort.

This work has value for me.

I can succeed at this.

Meaningful learning requires struggle, confusion, and even mistakes.

Now, that last one wasn't in the original paper, but we've added it because it's so essential.

And we'll be discussing all five of those statements in coming sessions.

Just below mindsets is academic perseverance, which comprises a diverse but related set of psychological concepts that recently has received increased attention.

It represents the inclination for learners to focus and persist for extended periods of time in the face of distractions and temptations.

It's related to the overlapping concepts of grit, tenacity, delayed gratification, self-discipline and self-control.

Without these tendencies, high achieving academic performance is difficult.

And so far there's not much evidence they can easily be taught.

To the left of perseverance you'll see social skills.

While important, we won't focus too much on them, but they include the interpersonal qualities of empathy, cooperation, responsibility, and assertion.

They capture how students interact and collaborate to learn more effectively from each other.

Finally, learning strategies encompasses study skills and meta-cognitive strategies aimed at helping our students lead their own learning in a self-regulated way.

We'll give major focus to learning strategies for at least two reasons.

First, there's now really good cognitive science research that can be translated into useful teaching strategies to help us improve our instruction.

Second, that same research can be applied to help our students learn more effectively themselves.

We'll cover all of this in a later session.

Of course, these non-cognitive factors don't operate in a vacuum.

The school and classroom context, included near the top of this model, can shape student achievement in positive or insidious ways.

School and classroom environments depend on the resources available, policies about grading and tracking, curriculum choices and instructional requirements, safety, student norms and expectations, faculty workload, and school leadership.

Equally crucial is the category at the very top, students' broader socio-cultural environment outside of school.

To learn and flourish, all of us require shelter, food, economic security, safety, family stability, and health.

These factors can profoundly encourage or constrain teacher effectiveness and opportunities for students to learn.

Unfortunately, we can talk all we want about the science of learning and its implications, but if basic classroom and school resource needs are not being met, or important systemic obstacles are in place, it becomes difficult to meaningfully use in classroom the information we're conveying here.

We cannot underestimate or ignore the very real factors creating stark inequalities among our schools, in the lives of our students.

If they aren't addressed and remediated, it will be very difficult for all of our students to learn in optimal ways.

Almost no matter what we do within our schools, regarding teaching and learning.

And this brings us to the last and most important element of this model, the students themselves, their backgrounds, experiences, and characteristics.

No other factor shapes our effectiveness as teachers more significantly.

And it's why we should all practice what one educator called inside out teaching.

The principle is that effective teaching always begins with the learner.

My first move as a teacher is to consider foremost the students I'm about to engage.

When they walk into my classroom, what prior experiences, knowledge, hopes, aspirations, fears, wants and needs, skills, and questions are they bringing with them? How will those influence how and what I'll teach them? As David Ausubel said in one of the first textbooks published in 1968 about cognitive science, "The most important single factor influencing learning "is what the learner already knows.

"Ascertain this and teach accordingly."