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Exploration of the Non-Cognitive 

Ability Assessment 
The Scientific Value of the Survey on Social 

and Emotional Skills 

Xiaoqiao Cheng 

School of Institute of Education Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210097, 

Jiangsu, China 

“The cognitive development of the players is enormously im-

portant, as well as social competence and character values 

such as discipline and teamwork.” 

–Joachim Low 

OMPARED with cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills cannot be ac-

complished through simple academic level tests. It is more through self-

reported research and observation reports of others. These two methods are 

relatively easy to be proposed and tested, but they are easily affected by so-

cial expectations, response style and familiarity, resulting in deviations from 

the real results (Braun et al., 2001; He & Van de Vijver, 2015). Therefore, 

non-cognitive ability assessment is more challenging. 

The PISA test coordinated by the Organization for Economic Coopera-

tion and Development (OECD) has become a teaching evaluation test system 

recognized by countries. The test measures the cognitive skills of 15-year-old 

adolescents around the world by testing and comparing students’ reading, 

mathematics, and science every three years. Since most of the content of the 

test is the cognitive category of the students, it is considered that “too much 

emphasis on standardized testing, narrowing the content of students’ learn-

ing, ..., paying too much attention to the cognitive ability of young people 

while ignoring the development of non-cognitive ability” (Huang, 2019). 

 

 

 
 

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C 



 

BECE, Vol.9, No.1, 2021 1164 

In recent years, the OECD has also begun to focus on the research and 

development of non-cognitive capability. It tried to introduce international 

evaluation standards to test students’ creativity to test the “soft skills” of stu-

dents from various countries, that is, social and emotional skills such as crea-

tivity, teamwork, communication and negotiation, and named it Social and 

Emotional Skills. 

Based on related research, the evaluation framework for students’ social 

and emotional skills has been constructed, and the evaluation project of “So-

cial and Emotional Skills” for adolescents were launched in 2018. This aims 

to evaluate the social and emotional skills of young people in participating 

countries and cities, and how to improve these skills through education, so as 

to promote the balanced development of cognitive skills and social emotions. 

At the end of 2019, the first round of official evaluation was completed in 10 

cities in 9 countries around the world. On September 7, 2021, the OECD of-

ficially released the global report on the Survey on Social and Emotional 

Skills at its headquarters in Paris, France. 

The evaluation of the SSES project is based on complex measurement 

methods designed to capture characteristics that are difficult to quantify. It 

uses the “Big Five” personality characteristics as the fundamental test system. 

It measures 19 specific social and emotional skills produced by the “five” 

personality factors of psychology. Furthermore, through a tripartite question-

naire of parents, teachers, and schools, collect information about the learning 

environment of students’ homes, schools, and communities, and finally ob-

tain information about the conditions or practices that cultivate or hinder the 

development of these key skills. 

In terms of measurement methods, unlike other large-scale international 

assessments PISA conducted before, the OECD measures social and emo-

tional skills based on the student-parent-teacher “triangulation” model 

(Kankaraš et al., 2019). That is, in addition to the traditional student self-

evaluation, the indirect evaluation of the students’ social and emotional skills 

by parents and teachers has improved the reliability of the evaluation. In or-

der to achieve mutual verification between the collected information, the 

primary guardian is responsible for filling out the student-related information 

in the parent questionnaire. The teacher questionnaire is completed by the 

teacher who knows the student best, and each teacher is responsible for no 

more than 10 students. The school questionnaire is completed by the school 

principal or person in charge. 

In terms of measurement tools, in order to solve the validity problem 

and correct the methodological limitations of self-reporting and observer re-

porting, the SSES test combines quantitative and qualitative methods. After 

many rounds of empirical inspection and testing, the evaluation rubric for 

each skill is finally developed. The rubric is not composed of simple, 

straightforward, and simple items of a certain reading level, but contains a 

series of overall items that share the same orientation and measure the same 

structure. Multiple rounds of inspection and testing include cognitive inter-



 

BECE, Vol.9, No.1, 2021 1165 

view, online survey, topic experimental test, trial test and final formal test 

(OECD, 2021, September 7). 

As for the test subjects, the SSES evaluation comprehensively considers 

the age of the students and the sample size when selecting the samples to en-

sure that the samples are highly effective and representative. Compared with 

PISA, the SSES test object has been expanded, not only for 15-year-old stu-

dents, but also for 10-year-old students. Each country participating in the 

project has no less than 6,000 test subjects. In addition to students, the ob-

jects also involve parents of students, teachers who are most familiar with 

students, and school principals or principals (OECD, 2021). Prior to this, 

other social and emotional competence tests have been carried out interna-

tionally, such as the Program for the International Assessment of Adult 

Competencies (PIAAC), the International Early Learning Study (IELS) and 

the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). TALIS is aimed at 

teachers, PIAAC and IELS are skills tests for adults and 5-year-old children 

respectively. Therefore, in addition to more diverse testers, the SSES test al-

so fills in the gap in the experience data of 10 to 15-year-old teenagers in the 

relevant international tests. 

Compared with the existing research on social and emotional ability in 

the world (such as the social emotional learning project organized by “Aca-

demic, Social and Emotional Learning” in the United States, the “Teacher 

Emotional Intelligence” training project developed by the Yale Center for 

Emotional Intelligence at Yale University and the United Nations The 

UNICEF “Social Emotional Learning” project, etc.), the SSES project 

achieved a breakthrough in sample size and region. SSES is based on a rep-

resentative sample of students and is the first large-scale international study 

on the social and emotional skills of 10-year-old and 15-year-old adolescents 

and their impact on learning outcomes. Even though many of the indicators 

and measurement dimensions it uses are derived from existing research, its 

greatest value lies in allowing these indicators and measurement dimensions 

to be measured and comparable on a large scale in different countries and 

cultural backgrounds. This not only promotes peer learning between coun-

tries, but also provides an international model for global non-cognitive abil-

ity testing. 

At the same time, we are also worried about some problems that may 

exist in the SSES test. For example, did they pay attention to cultural and 

language differences in the preparation of the test questionnaire and interpre-

tation of the results? Will using the same questionnaire or scale between 

people of different languages and cultures affect the accuracy of the data? 

Will it cause people to distrust the questionnaire translation? From the previ-

ous PISA test, although a series of measures have been taken to improve the 

reliability and validity of the test tool during the test, the limitations of geo-

politics, linguistics and cultural background cannot be completely eliminated 

(Forestier, & Adamson, 2017). In addition, in terms of the representativeness 

of sample selection, the first round of testing was conducted in 10 cities in 9 

countries around the world. Then there were obvious differences in economy, 



 

BECE, Vol.9, No.1, 2021 1166 

politics, culture and education among these 10 cities, which will inevitably 

affect the performance of students in social and emotional skills. How to de-

fine the relationship between the social and emotional skills of students and 

the factors mentioned above is also a question that needs to be explored 

(Zhou, 2021). 

Based on the above considerations, how to enhance the effectiveness of 

cross-regional non-cognitive ability assessment is of great significance. For 

example, in the evaluation method, the use of intelligent information tech-

nology (facial expression, action posture, eye movement, infrared brain im-

aging, etc.) can be used to explore diversified evaluation methods. In the 

evaluation tools, more contextual evaluation tasks are created. Using real 

problem situations as the carrier, examine students’ creativity, perseverance, 

emotional regulation ability and social interaction and other advanced and 

complex constructions (Zhang & Liu, 2021). In addition, in terms of evalua-

tion indicators, relying on the general indicators in the SSES project to help 

build localized evaluation indicators for each country, and conduct multi-

level and dynamic monitoring and measurement of social and emotional abil-

ity indicators, thereby forming a scientific localized evaluation system (Zu & 

Kyllonen, 2019). 

Finally, we should know that non-cognitive ability is different from 

cognitive ability. It’s not about highlighting specific characteristics to the 

maximum, but about achieving balance. Therefore, the idea of the SSES pro-

ject is not to create rankings, but to provide teachers, educators and policy 

makers with a “balanced” image in more dimensions. The final result of 

SSES is not a simple international competition, but aims to find out the effec-

tiveness and blind spots of each country’s education policy through evalua-

tion, further analyze the problems existing in the education development of 

each country, and show their respective achievements and advantages to pro-

vide countries with experiences from other countries that can be used for ref-

erence. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Correspondence to:  

Xiaoqiao Cheng, Ph.D. 

School of Institute of Education Science 
Nanjing Normal University 

Nanjing 210097 

Jiangsu 
China 

E-mail: xqcheng2008@vip.163.com 

Conflict of Interests: None. 

Doi: 10.15354/sief.21.co017 

 

https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2019.01.002
https://doi.org/10.1787/19939019
https://doi.org/10.1787/92a11084-en
http://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/thestudyonsocialandemotionalskills.htm
https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=CJFD&dbname=CJFDLAST2021&filename=ZJYX202102012&uniplatform=NZKPT&v=gJzpcD%25mmd2FFP31nYs5nyy7yPVRIIGpGq0APwzRB%25mmd2BmFHF9lolxyX%25mmd2B2zwc3RvssG7sU3U
https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=CJFD&dbname=CJFDLAST2021&filename=ZJYX202102012&uniplatform=NZKPT&v=gJzpcD%25mmd2FFP31nYs5nyy7yPVRIIGpGq0APwzRB%25mmd2BmFHF9lolxyX%25mmd2B2zwc3RvssG7sU3U
https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=CJFD&dbname=CJFDLAST2021&filename=ZJYX202102012&uniplatform=NZKPT&v=gJzpcD%25mmd2FFP31nYs5nyy7yPVRIIGpGq0APwzRB%25mmd2BmFHF9lolxyX%25mmd2B2zwc3RvssG7sU3U
https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=CJFD&dbname=CJFDLAST2021&filename=ZJYX202102012&uniplatform=NZKPT&v=gJzpcD%25mmd2FFP31nYs5nyy7yPVRIIGpGq0APwzRB%25mmd2BmFHF9lolxyX%25mmd2B2zwc3RvssG7sU3U
https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.ps011
https://doi.org/10.19360/j.cnki.11-3303/g4.2019.09.003
mailto:xqcheng2008@vip.163.com

