Soft Skills in Education: Putting the Evidence in Perspective

This book examines the global movement of putting more emphasis on students’ social and emotional development in education. It provides some order in the unstructured multitude of desirable socio-emotional educational objectives and ambitions that have resulted from this movement and builds on a careful conceptual analysis. It starts out by examining the roots of the movement and discusses different emphases. Next it makes use of instructional and psychological constructs and theories to arrive at meaningful categorizations of major domains and types of social-emotional “skills”. One of the key assumptions is that social and emotional attributes are malleable by means of educational interventions. The book reviews available research evidence for this assumption, taking into account psychological studies and meta-analyses. It then creates new evidence based on a new meta-analysis, which concentrated on the effects of educational interventions on skills associated with the conscientiousness factor of the Big5 taxonomy. In the final chapter, the book discusses the implications for educational policy and practice; a discussion in which attention is given to political and ethical questions about the desirability of treating social and emotional attributes as educational goals.

Jaap Scheerens is Professor emeritus with the University of Twente in the Netherlands and currently associated with the research institute Oberon, in Utrecht. In his capacity as Professor of Educational Organization and Management, he was in charge of a research program on educational effectiveness and educational evaluation. During his career he was Scientific Director of a network of education faculties in the Netherlands and Director of the research institute of the Faculty of Education at the University of Twente. For many years he carried out activities for the OECD, as a chairman of a network to develop process indicators on educational systems and schools, and as chairman and member of the Questionnaire Experts Groups for PISA 2009 and 2012. He also coordinated numerous research projects funded by the European Union and worked as a consultant for the World Bank and UNESCO. He published 20 books and over 100 articles in international journals. He has also been involvedas consultant and lecturer in many educational activities in Italy. Recently he was a member of scientific advisory boards of INDIRE and INVALSI.

Greetje van der Werf is emeritus professor Teaching and Learning at the University of Groningen, where she coordinated the research program Educational Evaluation and Effectiveness of the department Educational Science. From 1986 to 2013, she was project manager of the large-scale longitudinal studies in primary and secondary education in the Netherlands. From 2000 to 2006, she was coordinator of the special interest research program (Social) Psychological Determinants of Educational Outcomes, which was financed by the Dutch Science Foundation. The objectives of this program was to study, within the context of the longitudinal studies in secondary education, the effects of personality characteristics, achievement motivation, self-regulation, social comparison processes and social relations in classes on students’ short and long term educational attainment. Within this research program, 6 PhD theses and a large number of scientific articles were completed under her supervision. Additionally, she was coordinator for the Netherlands of the first IEA study on Citizenship Education (ICCS), which study also resulted in a PhD thesis and several international publications. From the period September 2013 to September 2018 she was the fulltime Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences and responsible for the educational programs of this faculty. During this period, she was co-author of several review studies and meta-analyses on topics like meta-cognition and teacher expectations.

Hester de Boer is a post-doc researcher at GION education/research of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her methodological expertise is in meta-analysis. She has a wide interest in educational topics and has published and co-authored several meta-analytical studies in international peerreviewed journals. The subjects of these meta-analyses include teacher expectation interventions, metacognitive learning strategy instructions, differentiation practices, classroom management strategies and programs and school belonging. Furthermore, she has published a meta-analysis of the influence of the attributes of the implementation and measurement of educational interventions on the estimated effects. Besides these meta-analyses, she had published and co-authored several articles on teacher expectations, parents’ aspirations and secondary school track recommendations.