James Heckman, 2000 Nobel Laureate in Economics, manages the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago. In his quest to offer opportunities for human development, he has investigated the impact of personality on personal development, concluding that only 2% of test performance results were explained by the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of people, non-cognitive skills being a relevant predictive factor.
The center he manages; “a catalyst for collaboration between economists, biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists and sociologists interested in methodological innovation”, has an advanced line of research on Evaluation of the role and impact of non-skills cognitive
In 2018, it brought together numerous researchers to show the progress on “Measurement and evaluation of skills: real-time measurement of cognition, personality and behavior” based on the following premises:
- Any effective system of personalized education will need to take an inventory of the wide range of skills that have been found to predict achievement in school and in life.
- Traditional pencil and paper tests are quite cumbersome and are not designed to capture specific skills.
Personality and behavior self-reports are unreliable. - Teacher evaluations are subjective (though predictively more reliable), time consuming, and often cannot be compared to reports.
- Administrative data has predictive power (see, for example, Jackson, 2018 and Kautz et al., 2016) but must still be aligned with traditional measurements
HumanAI contributes to advances in research for human development by participating in collaborative projects with different educational centers. and organisms.
