Advances in the Assessment of Social, Emotional, and Self-Regulatory Skills

Dear Colleagues,

Social, emotional, and self-regulatory skills (SESS) – also known as non-cognitive skills, 21^st-century skills, or soft skills – have gained currency among both researchers and policymakers. SESS cover a wide variety of skills outside those measured by traditional intelligence tests and usually emphasize emotional and motivational aspects. Examples comprise communication skills, leadership, collaboration, work ethic, self-control, and emotional resilience. SESS are considered important to select and pursue goals, build and maintain relationships, regulate one’s emotions, and related everyday tasks. Recent contributions suggest that SESS predict various measures of success (e.g., academic achievement, career success) above and beyond measures of intelligence, also in cases where intelligence is broadly conceptualized and measured. Moreover, evidence suggests that measures of SESS are largely independent of traditional measures of intelligence, somewhat reminiscent of “multiple intelligences”.

Despite recent advances, the assessment of SESS has long lagged behind that of cognitive abilities. There are a number of reasons for this. SESS are typically assessed through multi-item self-reports inventories using rating scales, mostly using agree–disagree response formats. Such inventories often follow the Big Five model of personality as an organizing framework. Many existing studies on SESS, in fact, use Big Five inventories as measures of SESS. Such inventories allow for a highly economical assessment of multiple SESS and often show at least moderate correlations with a range of relevant outcomes (e.g., for achievement, attainment, social participation, or health).

However, rating-scale based assessments have several downsides. For example, they are prone to bias from response styles (e.g., social desirability, acquiescence). Moreover, they almost invariably measure SESS as typical performance, rather than maximum performance. As a consequence, the objectivity and validity of current SESS assessments, the distinction between SESS and personality traits, and the theoretical status of SESS continue to be hotly debated.

In order to advance research on SESS, there is a need for novel assessment approaches as well as for further conceptual groundwork. The aim of this special issue is to promote such advances, both on a rather fundamental and on an applied level. We are looking for psychometric, theoretical, and empirical contributions including on (but not limited to) the following issues:

• Fundamental conceptual questions regarding the definition of SESS, their relation to intelligence and personality, and their nature as psychological constructs;
• The structure of SESS, their relation to intelligence and personality, and their incremental validity over intelligence and personality
• Relations between rating-scale based measures of SESS and other types of measures (e.g., behavioral tasks, psychometric games);
• Ways to improve traditional rating-scale based assessment approaches, such as multiple-informant approaches, situational judgement tests, or anchoring vignettes;
• Innovative assessment approaches, such as technology-based assessments, psychometric games and behavioral tasks, or machine learning approaches using text, audio, or video data or even using multi-channel data;
• Case studies and empirical applications of innovative assessment approaches for SESS in educational, vocational, and other settings

We explicitly welcome innovative and “risky” approaches, including reports of failed attempts to assess SESS or studies providing critical perspectives on the (often weak) relations between questionnaire-based and other SESS measures. Attempts to measure SESS from a maximum-performance perspective will be highly welcome.

Dr. Clemens Lechner
Prof. Dr. Samuel Greiff
Dr. Patrick C. Kyllonen
Guest Editors

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• non-cognitive skills
• socio-emotional skills
• assessment
• psychometric testing