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The Unequal Power of Character: How Schools Reward Non-Cognitive Skills

Han, Siqi
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531241258670126

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Sociology.
Non-cognitive skills such as self-control, self-efficacy and sociability are now considered to be as important as cognitive skills in determining adolescents’ educational achievement (Duckworth et al. 2007; Cunha and Heckman 2008). With effective policy intervention, these skills can be cultivated in school and their benefits are especially large for the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students. The excitement of realizing the “hidden power” of non-cognitive skills, however, overlooks an important fact that schools do not necessarily cultivate the same non-cognitive skills for all students. Previous studies on non-cognitive skills suggested a class divide in the type of skills students develop in school existed four decades ago (Bowles and Gintis 1976). Students from more advantaged backgrounds are likely to acquire non-cognitive skills appropriate for prestigious occupations, such as self-directed learning and creativity. In contrast, students from less advantaged backgrounds are likely to acquire a different set of skills demanded by lower-status occupations, such as being docile and following orders. Because this process assumes that the skills demanded by student future occupations are reflected in what teachers tend to cultivate for the student, classical theory named it “the correspondence principle” (Bowles and Gintis 1976). The class divide in the type of skills taught in school can be detrimental for disadvantaged students who aspire for upward social mobility. In the contemporary U.S. economy, more diverse demands rise for workers’ non-cognitive skills than four decades ago. These skills may include more than self-control and engagement with ideas, as described in the correspondence principle. Instead, the belief in one’s control over what happens in life, or internalized control, and the ability to engage others in social interactions, or engagement with others, are two important dimensions of non-cognitive skills that may also impact student school achievement differences. Chapter 2 of the dissertation explores whether these four non-cognitive skills are unequally rewarded in high school for all students. Internalized control is a key resource for lower-class families to overcome precarious living and working environments, thus it may be more rewarded for lower-class students. Engagement with others may be required by all kinds of jobs, including higher status ones such as lawyers and financers and lower status ones such as personal service workers and salesmen, thus it may be rewarded for both middle- and lower-class students. If the correspondence principle holds today, are disadvantaged students more likely to be encouraged to develop internalized control? Do they also get to develop engagement with others as their middle- class counterparts? If schools fall behind in cultivating a growing number of non-cognitive skills important for the educational and occupational outcomes of the disadvantaged students, these students can hardly compete in the labor market on an equal footing to their more advantaged counterparts for the good jobs. The correspondence principle is a theory based on how teachers react to student social class. However, class is not always visible, and other social statuses can also be the criteria on which teachers evaluate what a student will become of in the labor market. Race is one social status that could induce a similar heterogeneous effect of non-cognitive skills on student achievement. In Chapter 3, I explore whether teachers tend to reward Asian students more for their engagement with ideas while they reward white students more for their engagement with others. This different pattern is based on the observation that Asian students are more likely to end up in technical professions in the STEM sector, where engagement with ideas is much needed, while white students are more likely to become managers who need to fluently engage and lead other people. In addition to race, prior achievement can be a social status. Low-achievers tend to be ignored by teachers in classroom interactions, which lead to their lack of chances to activate their non-cognitive skills and impress their teachers (Brophy and Good 1970). In Chapter 4, I test this possibility of whether prior achievement affects how rewards to non-cognitive skills are assigned. I pay special attention to a type of engagement with others – whether a student is able to engage his/her teacher, and examine whether low-achievers are able to benefit the same way from their engagement with teachers as high-achievers. This dissertation illuminates the nuanced interactions between non-cognitive skills and different social statuses in determining student high school GPAs in the United States. Class, race and prior achievement have different impacts on how teachers perceive their students’ skills and their future labor market prospects, which then informs which skills teachers cultivate for students. By establishing four most important non-cognitive skills for student achievement and distinguishing their heterogeneous effects on student GPA, the dissertation offers a rich understanding of how educational inequality is reproduced through non-cognitive skills development and how school education today can be improved to help all students gain the valuable skills they will need in the future.
Claudia Buchmann (Advisor)
Rachel Dwyer (Committee Member)
John Casterline (Committee Member)
168 p.
Sociology
Non-cognitive skills; class; race; prior achievement; inequality; effect heterogeneity

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Han, S. (2018). The Unequal Power of Character: How Schools Reward Non-Cognitive Skills [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531241258670126

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Han, Siqi. The Unequal Power of Character: How Schools Reward Non-Cognitive Skills. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531241258670126.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Han, Siqi. "The Unequal Power of Character: How Schools Reward Non-Cognitive Skills." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531241258670126

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1531241258670126
150
© 2018, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License The Unequal Power of Character: How Schools Reward Non-Cognitive Skills by Siqi Han is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.