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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
The GCSE Mindset: 40 activities for transforming student commitment, motivation and productivity, written by Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin, offers a wealth of concrete, practical and applicable tools designed to supercharge GCSE students' resilience, positivity, organisation and determination. At a time when GCSE teaching can feel like a conveyor belt of micromanaged lessons and last-ditch interventions, Steve and Martin acclaimed authors of The A Level Mindset suggest a different approach, underpinned by their VESPA model of essential life skills: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude. These five non-cognitive characteristics beat cognition hands down as predictors of academic success, and in The GCSE Mindset Steve and Martin take this simple model as their starting point and present a user-friendly month-by-month programme of activities, resources and strategies that will help students break through barriers, build resilience, better manage their workload and ultimately release their potential both in the classroom and beyond. The book's forty activities, while categorised thematically under the VESPA umbrella, have been sequenced chronologically by month in order to better chart the student's journey through the academic year and to help them navigate the psychological terrain ahead. Each activity can be delivered one-to-one, to a tutor group or to a whole cohort, has been designed to take fifteen to twenty minutes to complete, and has been written with a pupil audience in mind. However, to complement the tasks' practical utility, the authors also explore the underpinning research and theory including the pioneering work of Angela Duckworth, Dr Steve Bull and Carol Dweck in more detail in the introduction to each section. Informed by the authors' collective thirty-plus years of teaching and coaching, this essential handbook for GCSE success also suggests key coaching questions and interventions for use with pupils and includes expert guidance on how schools can implement and audit the core components and outcomes of the VESPA approach in their own settings. Additionally and indeed pertinently in the present educational environment where empirical data is valued so highly the book features a chapter dedicated to the measurement of mindset, written by guest contributors Dr Neil Dagnall and Dr Andrew Denovan from Manchester Metropolitan University. They present the twenty-eight-item VESPA questionnaire, which they helped Steve and Martin to design, and take the reader through the research process behind its origins before going on to describe how it can be used to identify areas for development and to measure the impact of interventions. Suitable for teachers, tutors and parents who want to boost 14 to 16-year-olds' academic outcomes and equip them with powerful tools and techniques in preparation for further education and employment
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Praise for The GCSE Mindset
The GCSE Mindset is an excellent book packed with a wide range of really practical activities and exercises. The authors have done a fantastic job of coherently pulling together a vast array of helpful tools and in doing so have compiled a comprehensive guide for teachers in their quest to support pupils striving for academic success.
Dr Steve Bull, Performance Psychologist and Executive Coach, GamePlanCoach
The GCSE Mindset builds ably on the best of its precursor, The A Level Mindset, which proved so popular with heads of sixth form. The depth and detail is both a strength and a challenge as it will take dedicated staff at Key Stage 4 time to digest it, but if they are keen to improve outcomes and build skills then they, and their students, will be rewarded with a richly supportive tutorial scheme that will have an impact on exam results.
Year 10 and 11 assemblies, as well as tutorial time, have been waiting for The GCSE Mindset. This material is no fad and is here to stay for some time, as the thought and breadth of the book’s practical strategies are the result of the wealth of research and talent of two experienced practitioners, Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin. Get yourself a copy – you won’t be disappointed!
Michael Senior, CEO, Netsixthform.co.uk
In The GCSE Mindset Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin pose the question, ‘How can the theory be put into practice?’ and, in the same accessible way as in The A Level Mindset, they show you exactly how to do just that.
Kevin Green, Principal, Manchester Health Academy
I have worked with over twenty sixth forms to introduce some of the ideas behind The A Level Mindset and we are now beginning to see its activities and approaches pay real dividends, so it was with great anticipation that I read The GCSE Mindset and considered how the previous approaches could be applied to students at Key Stage 4. What Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin do in this book is make sense of the research into areas such as meta-cognition and growth mindset and come up with a practical and no-nonsense approach to supporting students’ learning through the GCSE years.
As the authors point out, in too many schools our students have become ‘passive learners’ in such a way that short-changes them and their progress. As a consequence, schools often fail to develop in students the skills and mindset they will need in their future academic and working lives. The focus of The GCSE Mindset, put very simply, is to tackle the question, ‘How do we make better learners?’ and the authors provide a thorough and thought-provoking attempt at addressing this issue.
Their VESPA system provides a clear umbrella under which schools can reflect on how they support student learning – so that rather than teachers pushing students, the students themselves develop their own approach to pull through their GCSE years. The authors provide a whole host of concise and practical activities that develop effective systems for learning, offer scaffolding for the setting of meaningful short- and long-term goals, and lay out what effective practice and revision really looks like. One of the changes from The A Level Mindset is to tackle the GCSE year on a month-by-month basis, tailoring activities to particular challenges and demands during this period. This is easily adapted to schools’ own experiences and it aims to support student learning more effectively; so in the run-up to mock examinations, for example, the focus is upon practice and resilience.
The activities themselves are brilliant, fun and engaging: each has a clear purpose, is easily adaptable to individual schools’ needs, and will encourage students to reflect upon their own learning as well as equip them with essential skills for GCSE study.
The GCSE Mindset is a really timely book that will help all schools facing the challenges of GCSEs’ linear assessment and the huge demands in terms of content to be learnt and the sheer number of hours now spent focusing on examinations. If nothing else, it forces all schools to ask some very serious questions about how they deliver the GCSE programme to their students, and how they nurture the skills required for success and the coping strategies needed within a more stressful assessment culture.
Mark Fuller, Sixth Form Consultant, Girls’ Day School Trust
A timely resource given the increasing interest in essential life skills and students’ well-being, this wellwritten book provides a wide range of beneficial activities to help students achieve their full potential and develop lifelong learning capabilities.
Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin have carefully drawn on research evidence and combined this with their extensive practical knowledge to create an informative guide for teachers, parents and GCSE students. With the pressurised and demanding education system we currently have, it is imperative that we support our young people to develop resilience and grit, and to manage and organise their learning effectively. The GCSE Mindset offers an excellent starting point for achieving this.
Professor Cathy Lewin, Manchester Metropolitan University
Authors’ Note
Education has always been a battleground of ideas. Follow a couple of hundred educators on social media and within a few days you’ll be witnessing – who knows, perhaps even becoming embroiled in – arguments about the purpose and process of education. Effect sizes are in; effect sizes are out. Studies can be replicated and peer reviewed; a few weeks later they can’t. Character education was in – now it’s ‘essential life skills’. Evidence-based teaching is everything, then intuitive common sense and good teacher–pupil relationships are key. Carol Dweck is a hero, or emphatically not. Sometimes it seems that all we can agree on is that learning styles don’t exist. (Except – deep breath – maybe they do.) These passionate and principled viewpoints, and the discussion that buzzes around them, are important. We’re all trying to become better at what we do and help pupils become better at what they do. But sometimes these arguments result in paralysis. If every theory, approach and study in the world can be debunked by one that proves the opposite, we have stasis; a discussion paralysed by an over-abundance of information. So we carry on as before until something demonstrably better arrives, and that helps no one.
The resources that follow are not a partisan polemic allied to a specific way of thinking – we’ve borrowed liberally from as many studies as we could. This book doesn’t represent a silver bullet either. But it does emerge from a combined forty years of teaching, tutoring, coaching, intervening and cajoling young learners forward in seven different institutions. We’ve since met, talked with and presented to thousands of people (staff and pupils) working in hundreds of schools and colleges across the UK and noticed this: despite our tendency as teachers to almost mythologise the specific challenges of our particular micro-contexts, wherever we go, young people face the same personal issues and challenges, fight the same battles of will and discipline, and experience very similar victories and setbacks.
Bearing all this in mind, we hope that you find something of use in this book. Ignore the material that doesn’t work for you, focus on the stuff that does and make as many alterations, adjustments and wholesale overhauls as you need to – and try to steer clear of those Twitterstorms too!
We might be the people who have hammered away putting these words on the page, but a book is the work of many hands. It’s almost ten years since we started working together. What started as a weekly early morning coffee meeting to discuss our ideas has developed into something far bigger than we could ever have envisaged. There are so many people who we’ve spoken to and who have helped shape our thinking. Thanks to Ben White for the erudite and analytical conversation, for developing ideas about leading and lagging indicators through discussion, and, of course, for the beer. Thanks to Neil Dagnall and Andrew Denovan for contributing Chapter 14: Measuring Mindset Using Psychometric Tests. Thanks to Lucy Parsons for her seemingly limitless enthusiasm for supporting students and for giving us the time and space to talk about our work. Thanks to Jennifer McGahan for the practice activity Test Yourself! We would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at Crown House, in particular, David Bowman for his unwavering support of all our ideas, Rosalie Williams for dealing with countless random emails and the whole of the brilliant production team who’ve worked tirelessly finishing this project to the highest standards!
We have made every attempt to recognise the work of those who have inspired many of the ideas and concepts that we have used in this book. We would, of course, like to make particular reference to the work of Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth for inspiring us to develop this system, and to thank the many teachers and pupils who have listened, experimented, commented, criticised and helped us tweak (and sometimes just ditch!) the tools we’ve developed.
@VESPAmindset
VESPAmindset.com
Contents
Introduction
Numerous instances can be cited of people with high IQs who fail to achieve success in life because they lacked self-discipline and of people of low IQs who succeeded by virtue of persistence, reliability and self-discipline. Heckman and Rubinstein (2001b), p. 145
While cognitive ability reflects what an individual can do, it is non-cognitive factors that reflect what an individual will do. McGeown et al. (2015), p. 12
Good character education is good education … we need to take character education as seriously as we take academic education. Berkowitz and Bier (2005), p. 3
Past Performance, Future Performance
About ten years ago, we had an epiphany of sorts. We were working together leading a comprehensive school sixth form in Greater Manchester, desperate to lift pupil performance and further strengthen the learning culture we had inherited. Analysing that particular summer’s results, something seemed suddenly clear. There didn’t seem to be a direct link between success at the end of one key stage and success at the next. Checking off those results learner by learner, it was obvious that some made giant strides between 16 and 18, leaping up from pretty modest results at the end of Key Stage 4 to outstanding results in Key Stage 5, while others went from great performance at 16 to modest grades at the end of their A level courses.
Why was this? We drew up a list of all the factors we considered might play a part in these deviations from expectation. Some were external (illness, family issues, mental health issues), some were behavioural (disengagement, listlessness, lack of effort) and some were psychological (lack of belief, deeply entrenched pessimism). It might have ended there, but that autumn term we began to study what it was about the ‘ceiling pupils’ that made them stop progressing and what it was about the ‘breakthrough pupils’ that made them suddenly improve. We identified sample groups, handed out questionnaires, observed kids during lessons, evaluated previous academic performance and took part in focus groups. We met the pupils regularly and talked about their approaches to study.
Put simply, we’d stumbled across the role that non-cognitive factors play in successful learning: the fact that past performance didn’t guarantee future performance. This ran counter to what some of our colleagues were telling us, and indeed what we’d thought ourselves at various stages of our careers. Listen for explanations of pupil underperformance at your place of work and the chances are they’ll be mostly cognitive and often inextricably linked to previous performance; rooted in a sense of inevitability that the past equals the future. You might hear that the pupil ‘has always been weak’, they were from a ‘lower set’, they ‘didn’t get it’, they were going to find their GCSE courses ‘too hard’, they’ve ‘never been a natural scientist’, we ‘shouldn’t expect too much of them’ and they’ve ‘always struggled with languages’.
Catch-all explanations like these externally justify pupil performance – they get the grades they do for reasons beyond a teacher’s control – and seem, to us at least, to remove responsibility for encouraging any further progress. ‘Give me some decent kids’, one member of staff once told us, ‘and I’ll give you some decent results.’
But we were seeing something very different. We were seeing a range of attitudes, values and mental models which accreted to form a set of behaviours that, in turn, determined the way in which pupils approached their studies.
Here’s just one study to consider – there are plenty more on the way. Mike Treadaway at research group Education Datalab has completed a fascinating study into pupil progress across different key stages. His findings are initially shocking but, on reflection, predictable. ‘We have an accountability system that has encouraged schools to check that children are making a certain number of sub-levels of progress each year,’ Treadaway begins in his 2015 paper, ‘Why measuring pupil progress involves more than taking a straight line’. He explains: ‘Take a child’s attainment at Key Stage One (age 7), look up the average attainment for children at the same level by Key Stage Two (age 11) and draw a straight line between the two assuming that linear progress will be made in each of the four intervening years.’ The same happens between Key Stages 3 and 4, of course, and then 4 and 5; the past equals the future. ‘But,’ Treadaway asks, ‘do children normally take such smooth learning journeys as they acquire knowledge and understanding in a subject as our accountability system assumes? And is it reasonable to deem children as “on target” or “in need of intervention” using this approach?’
The findings are alarming. Treadaway notes that ‘by reviewing the data we find that only 9% of pupils take the expected pathways through Key Stage Two, Key Stage Three and Key Stage Four Levels’. Less than one in ten pupils follow the line we’re using to anticipate and measure their progress. That’s across three key stages, you might think – shorten the period of time and huge numbers of kids will turn out to be on the line. Well, the figure goes up, sure. But nowhere near as much as you might expect. Performance at point A – wherever you choose that to be – doesn’t guarantee performance at point B, just as we’d found.
So where are the 91% of pupils who should be on the line? And why aren’t they there? Well, some are above it and some are below it, just like our initial metaphor of the ‘ceiling’ pupils and the ‘breakthrough’ pupils. As to why, when we stopped using previous performance as an indicator of likely future success and analysed instead our ceiling pupils’ habits, routines, attitudes and approaches to study, that’s when we found patterns. Here are a few examples of the kind of similarities we discovered. Detailed note-taking seemed to be a characteristic of those who left the line upwards. Tidiness and organisation of learning resources seemed important too, as were acknowledging and working on weaknesses. Commitment to independent study was key. Positivity, enthusiasm and having a goal all came through as characteristics and behaviours that breakthrough pupils had and did a lot of, and ceiling pupils didn’t.
It was, and continues to be in our experience, skills, strategies and habitualised behaviours that determined academic success. These can change, and pupils can leave the line as a result. Damaging attitudes and beliefs can become entrenched, levels of effort can vary, commitment falters and organisational systems collapse under the pressure of a new key stage.
Performance Virtues
The discussion around developing pupils’ non-cognitive skills has continued to be high on the agenda for practitioners, school leaders and governments. But attempting to develop these non-cognitive skills and habits without knowing precisely what they are is nigh on impossible. So how do we categorise and define these characteristics? And what language do we use while we attempt to do so?
Perhaps one of the most significant developments in the last few years has been the work of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham. (We would strongly recommend all readers to visit www.jubileecentre.ac.uk and take advantage of the extensive resources that they offer – it’s a treasure trove.) The Jubilee Centre defines these non-cognitive qualities as ‘a set of personal traits and dispositions that produces specific moral emotions, informs motivation and guides conduct’ (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2017, p. 2), and their research identifies four categories that they refer to as ‘virtues’:
» Intellectual virtues such as curiosity and critical thinking.
» Moral virtues such as courage, honesty, humility, empathy and gratitude.
» Civic virtues such as acts of service and volunteering.
» Performance virtues such as resilience, application and self-regulation.
We believe that this framework provides a really useful starting point when considering the virtues and characteristics that any school would want to develop in their pupils. The Jubilee Centre makes a compelling argument that schools should consider intellectual, moral, civic and performance virtues when considering the kind of citizens it wants to develop (Figure 0.1).
Figure 0.1. Non-cognitive qualities: the building blocks
Source: Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues (2017), p. 5.
We were lucky. When we began this work we were operating in a school whose pastoral systems and structures were geared towards outstanding delivery of moral and civic virtues. And, as Figure 0.2 illustrates, civic and moral virtues are strongly connected to academic performance and develop academic behaviours that are important in the classroom. We were at an advantage.
Figure 0.2. Linking virtues to academic performance
Knowing the school operated extremely well in terms of the development of civic and moral virtues, and that we were doubtless experiencing a positive knock-on effect of the sort illustrated here, we found our attention focused on performance virtues – the business of making pupils better learners.
This choice emerged from our context and circumstances. We didn’t know it at the time but the argument for developing pupils’ performance virtues has continued to gain momentum (see Gutman and Schoon, 2013 for a review).
Non-Cognitive Skills and Seven Crucial Constructs
Achievement tests miss, or perhaps more accurately, do not adequately capture, soft skills – personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences – that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. Heckman and Kautz (2012), p. 451
The terms used – the language of performance virtues, if you like – continue to generate considerable debate. If you’re interested in researching and reading further, you might find performance virtues variously described as non-cognitive skills, soft skills, twenty-first century skills, character skills, and social and emotional learning skills.
There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these terms, but the easiest to conceive of and consider, for us, has been ‘non-cognitive skills’. Whatever your preference or inclination, the most important thing, of course, is the universal use of the term ‘skills’, which suggests a series of approaches, strategies and tools that can be learned.
So what are these essential skills, exactly? And which ones should we prioritise?
There is, as you might imagine, considerable discussion over this. Go looking for a universal measure of non-cognitive skills and you’ll be disappointed. Instead, you’ll find a large range of models or ‘constructs’ used to describe and explain non-cognitive skills, offered up by a huge number of academics and researchers from a vast array of institutions. There’s a lot of noise out there.
We’ve studied pretty much all of them, and tried to distil the best of them for you here. Think of this section of the book as a sort of crash course in the role of non-cognitive skills in academic performance, and you won’t go far wrong. We’ve identified seven constructs (see Figure 0.3) which we think are key to pupil success. We’re going to refer to these in subsequent chapters so they deserve some explanation here. Some of them will be familiar – apologies for rehashing; others hopefully less so.
Figure 0.3. Seven important non-cognitive constructs in education
Growth Mindset
Most teachers are now familiar with the work of Carol Dweck (2017). If not, we would strongly recommend her book, Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential. Her research suggests that beliefs about ability and intelligence vary greatly, and that the beliefs adopted by a young person can have a significant impact on their achievements. She argues that individuals have a certain ‘mindset’ regarding their ability, and that this mindset is a fluid and changing thing. At one end of the continuum are those who believe they have a ‘fixed’ mindset. These individuals suppose that their intelligence is fixed at a certain point and, as a result, avoid challenging situations because they fear failure. They withdraw effort during difficult tasks to protect their ego.
At the other end of the continuum are those with a ‘growth’ mindset. These individuals believe that intelligence is malleable and that if you work hard you can improve your level of ability. They put themselves in challenging situations and work their way through them, listening to feedback and acting on it. They view failure as an opportunity to grow and, as a result, behave in a very different way in a learning environment. In other words, the two types of pupil operate differently, study differently and think differently.
Dweck goes on to say that our mindset changes in response to challenge, growth or circumstance. ‘Nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time,’ Dweck notes. ‘Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait’ (see Gross-Loh, 2016).
We’ve found Dweck’s work to be extremely valuable, and it’s certainly helped to shape our thinking. A pupil’s mindset – a snapshot, at least, of a fluid mindset – can be measured using Dweck’s mindset questionnaire: https://mindsetonline.com/testyourmindset/step1.php. There is some evidence to show that a pupil’s growth mindset links to academic performance and that it can be developed (Yeager et al., 2013).
Grit
Angela Duckworth’s work on grit has gained a lot of media attention since her 2013 TED Talk (which is worth watching if you’re new to grit). Duckworth (2016) defines grit as an individual’s passion and perseverance towards long-term goals. What distinguishes grit from some of the other constructs discussed here is its reference to long-term goals. Duckworth argues that maintaining effort and interest over the years, despite setbacks, are the main characteristics of the gritty individual.
We believe that GCSEs require pupils to be gritty. Grit can be measured using the grit scale developed by Duckworth and her colleagues (2007). We’ve included the questionnaire as one of the tools in Chapter 4. Duckworth has recently set up a lab to focus on how to intentionally cultivate grit. Her website (https://characterlab.org/tools/grit) offers a range of tools that can be used with pupils.
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that they have the capability to succeed at a particular task. Most teachers will have had experience of working with pupils who have faced repeated failure and as a result have low self-efficacy. It seems obvious with these pupils that if we get them to succeed (even on a small scale), then their confidence and motivation should increase.
There is a reasonable amount of evidence to show that pupils with high self-efficacy work harder and persevere more (Multon et al., 1991) and there is some solid evidence that it is a useful predictor of academic success (Bandura, 1997). A number of scales are used to measure self-efficacy – for example, the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire shows evidence of high levels of reliability and validity.* There are a few studies that have attempted to develop pupils’ self-efficacy (e.g. Schunk, 1981); however, most of the studies that have been undertaken have simply shown a correlation between the construct and academic performance.
Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is part of the ‘big-five’ personality model (a famous model developed over a century or so ago, with Lewis Goldberg coining the term as part of his contribution in the 1980s) which suggests that there are five broad dimensions to personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Conscientiousness is the most widely predictive of the commonly used personality measures. It has been linked to academic performance at all levels of schooling (Poropat, 2009) and studies show that it predicts ‘educational attainment, health, and labor market outcomes as strongly as measures of cognitive ability’ (Heckman and Kautz, 2012, p. 452).
Personality inventories define a range of lower level traits that sit under conscientiousness; however (surprise!), there is some disagreement about which traits. The two most common are orderliness and industriousness. Orderliness does what it says on the tin – organisation, in other words – and industriousness describes a predisposition for hard work and persistence (Ivcevic and Brackett, 2014).
There are a number of measures used to evaluate the ‘big five’ personality traits (e.g. the Big Five Inventory which can be found online†). Like self-efficacy, most of the studies on conscientiousness are correlational. To date, there has been very little research undertaken on attempting to develop conscientiousness in pupils, partly due to the complexity of this interrelated construct.
Self-control
Self-control, which is generally defined ‘as the ability to resist short-term impulses in order to prioritise longer-term goals’ (Gutman and Schoon, 2013, p. 20), is considered to be a lower level trait or facet of conscientiousness.
Perhaps the most famous study testing self-control is the ‘marshmallow experiment’, conducted by Mischel et al. (1972) at Stanford University, which has since become a school assembly classic. Most teachers and pupils have now watched the video clips of young children being given a marshmallow and then offered a reward if they are able to delay gratification. In follow-up studies, pupils who were able to wait (around fifteen minutes) were found to do better academically and had better life outcomes.
Apart from doing the marshmallow test in class, the self-control scale developed by Tangney and colleagues (2004) is probably the most widely used (pupils might prefer the thirteen-item version to the ninety-three items!). Despite strong correlational evidence suggesting that self-control predicts academic outcomes, there have been few studies that have attempted to develop self-control in isolation. We’ve found, like many of you, that showing videos related to the marshmallow experiment can generate some interesting discussions with pupils, but we have struggled to design specific tools to develop this particular trait (though Now vs. Most (Activity 36) has a pretty good stab at it).
Resilience and Buoyancy
Resilience is a term that we are hearing a lot on our visits to schools. Resilience has typically been characterised ‘in terms of “acute” and “chronic” adversities that are seen as “major assaults” on the developmental processes’ (Martin and Marsh, 2008, p. 53).
We prefer the term suggested by Martin and Marsh, which is ‘academic buoyancy’. In the classroom it’s more about bouncing back from small disappointments and setbacks rather than acute or chronic adversities. We appreciate that resilience might be needed by some pupils who have these types of events in their lives, but not by the majority.
There are a number of organisations using a resilience framework to support the development of young people. Professor Angie Hart at the University of Brighton probably leads this field of work in the UK. Her website (www.boingboing.org.uk) supplies an overview of the framework and a much more thorough explanation of resilience than we’ve provided here.
Meta-cognition
Finally, meta-cognition was a term initially developed by Flavell (1979). He referred to it as ‘thinking about thinking’. We have saved this term until last since, for us, metacognition encapsulates elements of all the constructs discussed above. The term has now been broadened quite significantly and is used regularly. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), for example, suggest that it’s about helping ‘learners think about their own learning more explicitly. This is usually by teaching pupils specific strategies to set goals, and monitor and evaluate their own academic development.’‡
There are a number of inventories/questionnaires used to measure metacognition (including our own in Chapter 13), and a range of interesting research projects currently being delivered in the UK that are using meta-cognitive strategies to support and improve pupil performance. It’s worth visiting the EEF website to check on their progress; we will be.
As you can see, it’s a complicated world of research, conjecture and experimentation out there!
What seems to be beyond doubt is that non-cognitive skills contribute significantly to pupils’ performance; the evidence base for this is convincing and is growing considerably (e.g. Khine and Areepattamannil, 2016). It’s notable that, as courses lose their modular elements, non-cognitive skills become even more important; a pupil’s grit, self-belief, self-control and resilience become significant factors as the period of pre-exam preparation extends and performance is judged by a single terminal exam. The short-term snapshots of monthly test scores, for example, tell us one thing; the final exam tells us quite another. Farrington et al. (2012) illustrate this well, and provide a useful visual summary of where non-cognitive factors fit over the distance of a two-year qualification (Figure 0.4).
(It’s worth noting that, to date, there is no conclusive evidence on the percentage distribution of these factors.)
Figure 0.4. Factors measured by test scores vs. grades
Source: Farrington et al. (2012), p. 4.
We hope that, like us, you’re getting to grips with the possible components we need to be strengthening and developing in our pupils. Next, it’s time to turn our attention to the rest of the book: the ‘how’.
Practical Tools and Strategies – The ‘How’ of Non-Cognitive Skills Development
For all the discussion of non-cognitive factors in recent years, there has been little conclusive agreement on how best to help young people develop them. Tough (2016), p. 5
Awareness of non-cognitive factors, and of their importance, has been with us for a long time. Alfred Binet and his collaborator, Theodore Simon – the French psychologists responsible for the invention of the IQ test – were considering non-cognitive factors in 1916, when they suggested: ‘[Success in school] … admits of other things than intelligence; to succeed in his studies, one must have qualities which depend on attention, will, and character; for example a certain docility, a regularity of habits, and especially continuity of effort. A child, even if intelligent, will learn little in class if he never listens, if he spends his time in playing tricks, in giggling, in playing truant’ (Binet and Simon, 1916, p. 254).
Looked at from this perspective, progress in the academic world around developing non-cognitive skills in young learners has been frustratingly slow. If Binet and Simon could see us now, a hundred years later, they would surely be sorely disappointed with education’s lack of progress in this area.
So, why has it been so hard to make progress?
Two reasons, we think. First, much of the conflicting research between many of the theoretical models and constructs (operationalised by an array of inventories) has left us all a little confused. There’s just so much out there, and no unifying theory. (See the Authors’ Note at the beginning of the book for a short summary of information abundance and paralysis.)
A second frustration has been that most of the research can be pretty inaccessible to teachers on both a practical and academic level. Very few of the academic papers we’ve been discussing offer any real practical suggestions to the profession. (We share the sentiments of the British Medical Journal, which has now banned the phrase ‘more research is needed’! More research is always needed, but at some point we have to look at how the theory can be put into practice.) We’ve found that many school leaders and teachers are unsure how to make the leap from theory to practice – beyond telling pupils about the studies, that is – and unsure how to develop these important skills with their pupils in a coaching or classroom environment. There is a danger that, because of these difficulties, the evident advantages to teaching non-cognitive skills will just get ignored.
Since the publication of The A Level Mindset we’ve been overwhelmed with the positive responses the book has received from practitioners. As we’ve travelled up and down the country visiting schools and colleges delivering training on the VESPA model (more on this later) teachers have been asking us, ‘How can we deliver this to GCSE pupils?’ We’ve been asked continually for practical tools and strategies that might make a difference to pupils at Key Stage 4.
The remainder of this book concerns itself, therefore, with the ‘how’ of non-cognitive skills development – with turning theory into concrete practice. Rather than align ourselves too closely with any one particular model or construct, we’ve tried to incorporate the most relevant and useful constructs from all the research we’ve read into one simple framework that can be used practically with teachers and pupils. We’ll share that with you in the next chapter.§
In developing our model and tools, we’ve tried to make sense of the research and develop a practical approach that can, hopefully, be used by teachers in their classrooms and have an impact on their pupils’ performance, developing strategies, habits and skills that will be useful beyond the classroom.
This is our attempt at imposing some sort of order on the chaos.
* See http://stelar.edc.org/instruments/motivated-strategies-learning-questionnaire-mslq.
† See http://personality-testing.info/tests/IPIP-BFFM/.
‡ See https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/resources/teaching-learning-toolkit/meta-cognition-and-self-regulation/.
§ We’re aware of the irony here. The problem is too many models so our solution is another model. Ridiculous, right? Our hope, though, is that this is less a set of new propositions and theories in non-cognitive skills, and more a unifying theory that organises existing research in an accessible and actionable way.
1. The VESPA Model
An Introduction to VESPA
Our work, undertaken across both Key Stage 4 and 5 over the last eight years, suggests that a five-part model is at the heart of non-cognitive skill development and academic success. Each part is as important as the others.
Pupils who are successful score highly in the following qualities:
» Vision – they know what they want to achieve.
» Effort – they work hard and put in many hours of proactive independent study.
» Systems – they organise their learning resources and their time.
» Practice – they use deliberate practice and develop their skills.
» Attitude – they have a growth mindset and respond constructively to setbacks.
