Education Next – Jay P. Greene
“A new study led by Nicholas W. Papageorge at Johns Hopkins University and IZA examines the connection in Great Britain between teacher reports about behavior when students are 11 and later life outcomes for those students. Because non-cognitive measures are in their infancy, we aren’t entirely sure how to slice and dice the measures and do not have a clear system for labeling the related concepts we are measuring. In this study, if we simply lumped all of the teacher reports of misbehavior together we would find that students who misbehave more tend to do worse later in life. But if we split misbehavior into two categories — one that captures misbehavior directed toward others (externalizing) and another that captures whether students are misbehaving because they are withdrawn (internalizing) — the picture gets more complicated. Students who score poorly on measures of internalizing misbehavior still seem to fare poorly later in life. But for students who score lower on the externalizing misbehavior, how they fare later depends on their social class.”(more)