In recent years economists have shown increasing interest in the role of ‘non cognitive skills’ and ‘soft skills’ in the determination of academic achievement, workplace behaviour and economic preferences. This has led them into psychology where questions of motivation, aspirations and perseverance have long been researched. This presentation maps the terrain of ‘assessing non-cognitive skills’ through the experience of developing country-validated assessments of motivation in recent Young Lives research in Ethiopia, India and Vietnam.
The presentation will suggest that Sustainable Development depends on the motivation of human beings to sustain their learning throughout life. A motivation to sustain one’s learning provides fulfilment in life, supports productive and meaningful livelihoods, contributes to the socialisation of future generations and, when engaged collaboratively, can help to overcome myriad challenges that face our 21st century world.
The presentation suggests that motivational patterns laid down during the school years may have a strong effect on motivation in the future. It advances a model of gains in learning outcomes in school that embraces motivation and academic beliefs, effort and interest and learning practices and emphasises the importance of linking concepts to theory as well as to measures.
Preliminary results from pilot work indicate the reliability of measures of learning motives oriented to personal development, significant others, the future and assessment and of academic self confidence, effort and interest in the subjects being learned. The pilot work raises procedural and logistical concerns and underlines the importance of scale development grounded in context and the pitfalls of ‘off the shelf’ borrowing of scales developed in one context and used in another. The pilot and the planned follow-up main study promise to contribute to conceptual and policy understandings of the correlates of learning achievement and gains in achievement.
