Balancing Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills: A Pathway to Student Success

Summary

Building on my experiences teaching in Tanzania, this article explores how balancing attention to cognitive and non-cognitive skills can enable students—especially those from underprivileged backgrounds—to overcome socio-economic obstacles and achieve success. By identifying the emotional and psychological hurdles these students experience, teachers can develop strategies that promote resilience, grit, self-motivation, and a ‘growth mindset’. Grounded in core educational theories and a set of practical frameworks such as Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), I argue that a holistic education that fosters both mind and character can help to close the achievement gap and advance equity in the classroom.?

Balancing Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills: A Pathway to Student Success

During my time teaching at one of the private schools in Tanzania, a reflective conversation with a colleague profoundly shaped my perspective. We were out on an evening walk, a cherished ritual where teachers often shared thoughts about their students and teaching experiences. My colleague was upset about some of her students. She couldn’t quite explain it. Several of them, she said, were academically behind the others, possibly because they had learning disabilities. As we walked and talked, I realized that two of the students in question were from poor backgrounds.?

I kindly proposed that the students may not have had learning disabilities but rather had limited access to resources. However, my understanding of the learning barriers related to the psychological and emotional challenges these students faced remained incomplete. Now that I know more about how cognitive and non-cognitive skills are learned, I can see that building non-cognitive skills like grit, resilience, and confidence could have been a big turning point for these students. This article aims to serve as a reflection and a call to action for teachers who may lack familiarity with strategies to overcome obstacles to students' success from disadvantaged backgrounds.?

Cognitive vs. Non-Cognitive Skills: Understanding the Difference

Understanding the difference between cognitive and non-cognitive skills will help us to foster an educational environment that meets the needs of all, regardless of socio-economic status. Memory, reasoning, problem solving, and attention are cognitive skills that involve exchanging and processing information in the brain. We typically focus on these skills in school and prioritize them in selection tests like SAT scores and school-entry testing, as they are widely believed to be predictors of academic success.

Non-cognitive skills, such as perseverance, emotional regulation, self-discipline, grit, social competence, and intellectual curiosity, are harder to assess but perhaps even more important. Although we rarely directly teach non-cognitive skills, they significantly influence the prediction of long-term outcomes. Heckman and Kautz contend that non-cognitive traits have the potential to even matter more than cognitive skills for outcomes throughout life. Students who develop non-cognitive skills, such as a sense of grit or resilience, are better able to deal with everyday academic, social, and personal challenges, to overcome setbacks, to continue seeking ways forward even when things turn out unfavorably, and to flow with changing environments.

Like the rest of the world, Tanzania reflects a long-standing and problematic bias for measurability in education. The schooling ecosystem deeply engrains values of seeing potential in students and judging success through the use of standardized testing. But these efforts continue to reflect a heavy focus on cognitive skills that, in many ways, have little bearing on what the learning process means beyond school. The challenge is that, for low-income children, these non-cognitive skills may not yet have developed. With insufficient efforts from schools to grow them, the very process of attempting the required academic skills might be futile—and, by doing so, schools perpetuate the achievement gap between rich and poor.

The Emotional Toll of Unequal Expectations

Due to their home lives, low-income or disadvantaged students may arrive at school with feelings of inferiority, higher rates of stress, and low self-esteem. Asking them to perform at the same level as their wealthier peers can lead to a strong sense of failure and frustration.

The most damaging emotional effect is the toll it takes on students' self-esteem. Students who believe, based on repeated feedback, that they are falling short on success metrics and not keeping up with their peers internalize this belief as a sense of identity—that they are not as capable or as smart as those who are performing better. Time and again, students who face the most barriers to success bear the brunt of this punishment. The psychology literature is replete with studies showing that students from marginalized groups are uniquely at risk of underperforming when they are aware of their intellectual capacities. In this case, a stereotype threat is at stake. Claude Steele, a pioneer in research on racial and gender stereotyping at Stanford University, showed in 1997 that stereotype threat is much stronger when cognitive performance is the only goal and measure of success. Classrooms are especially inhospitable learning environments for students from class backgrounds with the most barriers to their success compared with students from more privileged class backgrounds, particularly when the only way to feel successful is through cognitive performance. This tends to alienate even more disadvantaged students, making them more likely to disengage from learning.

Beyond academic failure, emotional costs also impact a sense of belonging: students' engagement in school decreases if they perceive their personal experiences and cultural backgrounds as unwelcome. Behavior problems, disengagement, or simply dropping out can occur.

A Framework for Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

The solution is to create a school culture that allows teachers to foster the development of students’ cognitive and noncognitive skills. A practical approach is Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which is a designated strand of instruction that teaches students nonacademic capabilities such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. These promote expressing and managing a range of emotions, appropriately recognizing and responding to the perspectives and needs of others, establishing and maintaining positive relationships, and making responsible decisions. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (2015) established these guidelines and descriptions.

Bringing SEL into the classroom can lead to a more caring environment in which students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, feel welcome and engaged. A review of 213 studies of SEL by Durlak et al. (2011) concluded that SEL programs boosted academic performance as well as social competence and emotional wellbeing. For example, acquiring "skills to manage emotions and use them to persevere through challenges" can make learners more resilient and better prepared to overcome adversity at school and beyond.

This could be accomplished by integrating SEL into Tanzania's national school curriculum. While schools in urban areas, which are wealthier or have well-resourced public-private partnerships, are better able to promote the noncognitive skills students need to thrive, those in rural and underserved areas are likely to be much less so. Indeed, for many schools in Tanzania, SEL would likely be a very welcome addition to the curriculum. By making SEL a national priority, Tanzania could help create a far more level playing field upon which all students could have a greater chance of success.?

Practical Strategies for Promoting Non-Cognitive Skills

Schools can then foster non-cognitive skills, which require both direct instruction and a supportive school culture. Here are some concrete techniques:?

1. Supporting Growth Mindset: Carol Dweck's (2006) idea of a growth mindset, or seeing abilities as something that grows with application and effort, can be a useful way to encourage resilience. Schools can praise effort, not just ability, and also help students view setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow.

1. Taught Grit to Last: Angela Duckworth (2016) defined grit as—a passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Schools can cultivate grit by setting ambitious and often optimistic goals and providing unwavering support to students as they strive to achieve these goals.

1. Create Supportive Personal Relationships: Students’ noncognitive development can be supported through positive teacher-student relationships; students who have caring and believing teachers are more likely to overcome obstacles with confidence and perseverance. Many Tanzanian students lack positive personal relationships at home, so this psychosocial relationship at school can be especially important.

1. Promoting Teamwork: Transitional tasks, organized group work, and collaborative projects expose students to cooperative work environments, helping them develop skills such as teamwork, team leadership, communication, and empathy.

1. How to Work SEL Into the Curriculum: SEL doesn’t have to be a standalone class. You can use literature to inspire learners to discuss empathy—or use history to study contextual and responsible decision-making. For instance, when discussing historical events, you can ask students to consider what they would’ve done and what the empathetic and social consequences of their actions would have been like.

Critiques and Challenges

However, while there is value in emphasizing non-cognitive skills, SEL might distract attention from cognitive skill acquisition in parts of the world, such as Tanzania, where basic literacy and numeracy skills are still rare. The real difficulty is figuring out how to balance the two. One wonders if, as SEL gathers momentum, the fundamental academic fair will lose out. ?

Second, many Tanzanian schools—especially those in rural areas—lack material resources. Teachers, time, and resources—all of which are in short supply—are essential for delivering SEL programs. We will need to invest in improving teacher training and instructional resources to ensure that all children have the opportunity to develop both cognitive and non-cognitive skills.?

Moving Forward: A Call to Action

Teachers play a crucial role in creating an equitable learning environment where every child can fully develop their unique talents. Fair beginnings mean giving kids the same chances as everyone else. This means that poor kids, for whom fair beginnings mean easing mental and emotional pain, need both cognitive and non-cognitive support in school. ‘Character’ virtues such as perseverance, resilience, and emotional intelligence can help poor children overcome mental and emotional suffering and attain success.

This vision can become a reality in Tanzania through a national initiative to integrate SEL across the curriculum, provide teachers with the funding and guidance to enact such a program, and widen the gaps between urban and rural schools. An educational program that encourages ‘both sides of the brain’ will create a truly level field that encourages all children toward success—not simply those who were on an already privileged track. Enshrining these policies means that the government is taking decisive steps to encourage the development of the ‘whole child’.

References

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. (2015). What is SEL? https://casel.org/what-is-sel/

Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x

Duckworth, A. L. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. Scribner.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Heckman, J. J., & Kautz, T. (2013). Fostering and measuring skills: Interventions that improve character and cognition. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w19656

Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52(6), 613–629. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.52.6.613