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This chapter addresses the first of four paradoxes raised in the previous chapter—namely, that educational attainment has exceeded skill requirements in the last few decades. It starts by documenting trends in workplace skills from 1950 to 2000. Results indicate that cognitive and interpersonal skills continued to grow from 1950 to 2000 but that their rate of growth has slowed between the 1960s and the 1990s, while motor skills have declined in absolute terms since the 1960s. In contrast, educational achievement, as measured by the proportion of both high school and college graduates in the workforce, has continued to rise since the 1960s at an accelerating pace. The chapter also investigates the forces that drive the demand for skills and explains why the growth in that requirement has slowed down since 1970, even though educational attainment has escalated. Moreover, it explores the anomaly that the growth in cognitive and interactive skills has decelerated during a period characterized by a tremendous growth in the use of computers in production and the development of computer-driven information technology.

Cognitive rehabilitation can be defined as an intervention in which patients and their families work with health professionals to restore or compensate for cognitive deficits, thereby improving the patients' everyday functioning. This chapter discusses issues in cognitive rehabilitation, approaches to cognitive rehabilitation, and new directions in rehabilitation.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the objectives of neuropsychological assessment. It then discusses the behavioural neurology and neuropsychology approaches to assessment, assessment prerequisites, contra-indicators to assessment validity, the assessment process, cerebral organization and laterality, and specific cognitive skills examined during neuropsychological assessment.

This chapter explores the clinical phenomenology of symptoms such as hallucination, delusion, loosened associations, and pressure of thought that collectively make up what is termed as psychotic thinking (loss of contact with reality). It argues that psychotic thinking results from a loss of attunement between the cognitive skills of the psychotic person and those of others. The relevant skills are built on attentional control and selectivity that can be adjusted and refined in a social context so that the subject captures the same cues and constancies as those around them. Psychosis is a state in which attention is disrupted; the mechanisms do not function smoothly and do not adjust themselves to track conditions in the world in normal ways.

This chapter argues that the link between cognitive skills and schooling and between schooling and inequality is not clearly established. It discusses what fraction of residual inequality is explained statistically by the variation of cognitive scores across individuals and whether this fraction has changed over time. It also investigates whether cognitive skills become increasingly scarce as measured by their market return. Finally, it analyzes the extent the economic returns to schooling are explained by the contribution of schooling to cognitive skill.

This chapter first provides an overview of the various stages of cognitive skill acquisition in order to situate learning from worked-out examples in the course of learning a new skill. It then defines more precisely the meaning of learning from worked-out examples, provides reasons for its effectiveness, and discusses the relevance of self-explanations and instructional explanations as factors moderating the effectiveness of studying examples. It discusses the problem of structuring the transition from studying examples to problem solving. It describes a preliminary instructional model of example-based skill acquisition that currently guides our research. Finally, it outlines a set of research questions intended to guide future research, such as adapting the proposed fading procedure to individual learners.

This chapter focuses on the development of internal representations and processes as viewed from the perspective of dual coding theory. Relevant data are interpreted in terms of the assumptions of the theory and, where such data are not available, some testable implications are proposed. The chapter begins with some views concerning developmental mechanisms. It then considers evidence that bears on the verbal-nonverbal representational distinction, functional interconnections between and within the two systems, and the different functional properties associated with them individually and jointly.

This chapter reviews the progress that educational research on literacy has made in recent decades: the rejection of the literacy-illiteracy dichotomy, the adoption of direct literacy assessment in terms of multiple levels of proficiency, the investigation of literacy skills transmitted in schools, and the conclusion from cross-cultural research that school-based cognitive skills – often confused with literacy in general – are grounded in a Western intellectual tradition of deductive thinking. A hypothesis based on sociological, sociolinguistic and cognitive theories is proposed in which girls acquire in (bureaucratic) schools the reading comprehension and definitional skills that facilitate their performance in health bureaucracies.

This chapter discusses the importance of cognitive skills in wage determination. It examines two large surveys of twenty-four-year-old high school graduates to show that cognitive skills were a significantly more important predictor of real wages in 1986 than in 1978. In this survey, the mathematics test score was used as a measure of cognitive skills. The chapter also discusses the effects of family background and educational attainment on wage patterns.

This chapter reviews recent studies of primate foraging behavior in the wild. It suggests that the information processing problems primates encounter in foraging, particularly searching for ripe edible fruits, may have provided the impetus for the evolution of enhanced cognitive skills such as cognitive mapping and forecasting the ripeness of fruits based on the recent history of weather.

Many studies have shown strong positive associations between “non-cognitive skills”—a broad and ill-defined category of metrics encompassing personality, socioemotional skills, and behaviors—and economic success and wellbeing. These traits appear to be malleable early in life, raising the possibility that early interventions can decrease inequality and enhance economic productivity. In this paper, I discuss the extensive practical and conceptual barriers to using non-cognitive skill proxies in studies of economic growth. There is a lack of general agreement on what non-cognitive skills are and how to reliably measure them across developmental stages. A common reliance on behavioral indicators of skills ensures that both skill metrics themselves, and their payoffs, will be context-dependent. The interpretation of apparent skill gaps between demographic groups is particularly problematic. Using empirical examples based on the non-cognitive measures available in NLSY97 and Add Health data, I show that these indicators of adolescent skills have strong associations with educational attainment, but affect subsequent labor market outcomes only through education.

The pool of exam certified high school equivalents has changed greatly over the past 60 years. At the outset, exam certified equivalents were World War II veterans. The early equivalency tests were successful because they targeted these veterans, who had abundant character skills. The test certified their cognitive skills and their military experience certified their character skills. Nowadays, GED exam certification sends a mixed signal. In this chapter we show that across four different data sets, GED recipients have higher cognitive ability than other dropouts, but come from similar backgrounds and exhibit similar behaviours. The GED exam certifies cognitive skills, but dropping out of high school signals a shortfall of important character skills.

This chapter examines theory of mind (ToM) and related aspects of social cognition in children born deaf or with severe hearing impairments. It shows that, while these populations have the potential to develop language and cognitive skills in line with their hearing peers, they often present with severe delays in mentalizing abilities owing to impoverished access to language in the home. Much has been written about how deaf children of hearing families have delayed ToM because of differences in their early interaction with their hearing parents, implying that the role of language as a tool for joint attention and coordinated action could be decisive. Other theories have stressed structural aspects of language as crucial for typical development of social cognition, whereas still others have focused on executive functions. In addressing these issues, the chapter describes some initial attempts at using mind-mindedness measures with hearing parents talking to their two-three-year-old deaf children. It also introduces some new measures of ToM based on nonverbal looking tasks that are particularly appropriate for deaf infants.

The policy consensus for increasing school attainment across the world, summarized by “education for all”, has been eroding as improvements in schooling have not consistently led to better economic performance of countries. The prior analysis, however, strongly points to a focus on cognitive skills as the key issue, and this chapter highlights the fact that expanding school attainment has not systematically led to improved knowledge capital. Based on an overview of general facts about the knowledge capital in developing countries, this chapter turns to general cases that have been treated as puzzles, albeit for opposite reasons: Latin America with its inexplicable slow growth and East Asia with its stunning rapid growth. The focused analysis shows that there is nothing special in terms of growth and development about the East Asian experience or about the Latin American experience once knowledge capital is taken into consideration.

This chapter shows how studies of working memory performance in adults have shown that the ability to hold information in mind while manipulating or processing other material is a reliable predictor of a range of other skills. The finding that processing and storage constraints are independent of one another at both the level of individual and developmental differences has clear implications for existing theoretical accounts of complex span performance. However the factors that mediate the link between working memory measures and other cognitive skills must be a subset of those factors that constrain performance on working memory tasks. Determination of whether working memory problems are a cause or a consequence of an individual's learning difficulties is central to a proper understanding of the broader educational implications of such difficulties.

This chapter discusses some child factors that are associated with literacy development. First, it considers the entrance age and gender differences in academic achievement. It then discusses the role of IQ, cognitive skills, language, and academic skills in relation to student's success in school. The chapter also discusses the social behaviors that influence school readiness: social skills, temperament, and self-regulation.

This chapter serves as a continuation of the analysis of the ethnic niche, but instead focuses on the immigrants. It shows that ethnic niches stand out as a characteristic of nearly every immigrant group in all five locales, with concentration persisting even as immigrant cohorts settle down. The chapter takes the discussion of niches in a new direction by looking into the noneconomic characteristics of ethnic niches, while emphasizing the cognitive skills that are required by niche jobs. It shows that although skill sorts immigrants into “good” and “bad” niches, ethnicity still works as a basic structuring factor. The chapter concludes that concentration, and not dispersion, is the way to economic mobility, and that the search for advancement takes a collective instead of an individual form.

Music performance can be depicted as a cognitive skill with large memory demands, or as a motor skill with large physical execution demands. This chapter discusses the nature of memory for the motor aspects of music performance, focusing on the domain of piano performance. It suggests that performers' hand and finger movements, as well as conceptual intentions, are encoded in memory for performance. The transfer of performance skills from one musical task to another is also examined. Skilled performers show more transfer of learning across melodies that require different motor movements, suggesting that they were able to generalize beyond the particular finger sequence learned.