ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relevance of noncognitive skills in defining and measuring college and career readiness. One of the major concerns in college-readiness assessment is that readiness information comes too late in students' K–12 careers for meaningful corrective action and focuses narrowly on cognitive domains, to the exclusion of affective and contextual factors. Research consistently shows that personality factors like conscientiousness, interests, and striving improve predictions of college grades and graduation over admissions tests alone. Predicting performance in job training programs is made easier with noncognitive measures. The chapter discusses the measurement of noncognitive traits in educational settings, and provides three rationales—better prediction, more nuanced diagnoses, and actionable constructs. "Self-report" describes data that are collected via direct questions to students about their own psychological processes. Self-report questions are relatively easy to write and administer, but resulting data are vulnerable to two threats—reference bias and faking.
