Soft Skills and Soft Standards in a Sequential Learning Framework
Abstract
This paper studies the effect of soft skills in higher education by analyzing how personality types and instructor tendencies affect student performance through six sets of sequential classes. To do this, we look at freshman students at the United States Naval Academy from the class years of 1998 to 2018.The Naval Academy offers an ideal environment to test the effects of soft skills due to the unique controls of the academic environment: all students take the same core courses their freshman year and are randomly placed in sections with no ability to select instructors or peers. We analyze instructor grading tendencies in a grade-distortion model while controlling for a variety of background characteristics and accounting for student personality types as captured by Myers-Briggs. We define "cushy" instructors as those who, on average, tend to give higher grades than students are projected to receive based on background characteristics. Similarly, we define "challenging" instructors as those who tend to give lower grades than we would expect a particular student to achieve. We find that teachers have the most significant effect on subsequent student performance. Excessively "cushy" instructors hurt student performance in follow-on courses, especially in STEM courses. We also find that student personality measures matter for academic achievement overall and in a course by-course analysis: most notably, we see that "judgers" outperform "perceivers" across all courses and lead to a higher overall grade point average over all four years. Finally, we see that the gender of the student and instructor may play a role in the ability of a student to succeed in a follow-on course regardless of the signal an instructor sends with a grade.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 20, 2019
- Accession Number
- AD1073953
Entities
People
- Megan L. Hanson
Organizations
- United States Naval Academy