It is often argued that school success depends not only on intelligence, but also on what we refer to as “non-cognitive skills.” Think of things like perseverance, openness, social skills, and so on. A new international study by Avanesian and Rozhkova (2025) looks at exactly how such skills (they are actually more like personality traits) relate to school performance. They used a massive dataset from the OECD (more than 44,000 students in 7 countries). They asked themselves: Can these non-cognitive skills or personality traits reduce the influence of socio-economic background on school success? An important detail: this data comes from the 2019 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES). It is not nationally representative but is based on samples in several cities, including Helsinki, Houston, and Bogotá.
The short answer is: a little. Children from wealthier families are much more likely to stay in the top 25% of their class, regardless of their talents. But skills like task-orientation (a type of conscientiousness) and openness did indeed make a (small) difference. This was especially true for students from poorer families. A one standard deviation increase in task-orientation increased the chance of being in the top by about four percentage points. Not a miracle solution, but relevant nonetheless.
But the analyses also offer surprises. Collaboration and emotional regulation, generally viewed as positive, were actually negatively correlated with high performance. For collaboration, the researchers even found a “too much of a good thing” effect. A little collaboration helps, but too much comes at the expense of your own academic performance. They observed a similar phenomenon for emotional regulation: excessive calmness can also lead to lower academic ambition. This nuances the often simplistic narrative that “more social-emotional skills are always better.”
Yet the biggest elephant in the room remains inequality itself. Even with the same non-cognitive skills, children from wealthy families are, on average, more likely to excel than children from poor families. The researchers rightly conclude that such skills can be important, but not enough to eliminate social inequality. School and system factors play a much larger role in this.
What do we learn from this? That investing in non-cognitive skills can be valuable to the extent that they are learnable. This is certainly true for children from vulnerable backgrounds. At the same time, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: without broader measures against inequality, the effects will remain limited. It’s not a matter of either knowledge and cognitive skills, or social-emotional skills. Both are necessary, but always embedded in a broader social context.
Abstract of the study :
Academic achievement at school as a crucial determinant of further educational attainment is largely affected by family socio-economic status (SES). Non-cognitive skills may, at least partly, mediate this effect and serve as a promising aim for educational policy in leveling educational inequality. Based on OECD Survey for Social and Emotional Skills (OECD SSES), this paper uses a mixed-effects modeling approach to explore the relationship between non-cognitive skills, SES, and academic achievement for schoolchildren from 8 cities in 7 countries. The results suggest that non-cognitive skills significantly reduce the effect of SES on achievement, although it depends on the differences in country-level socio-economic and cultural context. Task performance and open-mindedness are the most influential non-cognitive skills related to achievement, with the effect being most pronounced among low-SES children. Significant non-linear effects are also observed for collaboration. Overall, our models reveal that while individual student differences account for most of the variance in academic performance, there is a non-trivial proportion of variance explained by non-cognitive skills, particularly among high achievers. This underlines the potential of targeted interventions aimed at developing these skills to foster academic excellence, especially within socio-economically diverse urban environments.