EDUCATION FOR LIFE AND WORK - Hewlett Foundation

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century
28 EDUCATION FOR LIFE AND WORK
• Crystallized intelligence (verbal comprehension, foreign language
aptitude, communication ability, listening ability, and the ability to
provide missing words in a portion of text)
• Retrieval ability (originality/creativity, the ability to generate ideas,
and fluency of expression in writing and drawing)
• Memory and learning (memory span, recall by association, free
recall, visual memory, and learning ability)
• Broad visual perception (visualization, spatial relations, speed
in perceiving and comparing images, and mental processing of
images)
• Broad auditory perception (hearing and speech, sound discrimination,
and memory for sound patterns)
• Broad cognitive speediness (rate of test taking [tempo] and facility
with numbers)
• Reaction time (computer) (simple reaction time to respond to a
stimulus, reaction time to choose and make an appropriate response
to a stimulus, and semantic retrieval of general knowledge)
We focused the content analysis on the first three factors—fluid intelligence,
crystallized intelligence, and retrieval ability—because the primary
abilities they included were most closely related to the 21st century skills
discussed in the reports and documents. It is important to note that our
content analysis did not address how valuable any of the 21st century
skills may be for influencing later success in employment, education, or
other life arenas. To carry out the content analysis we simply took lists of
competencies that other individuals and groups have proposed are valuable
and aligned them with research-based taxonomies of cognitive and
noncognitive competencies. In the following chapter, we discuss research
on the relationship between various competencies and later education and
employment outcomes.
Personality Taxonomy
For the past two decades, the “big five” model of personality has been
widely accepted as a way to characterize competencies in the interpersonal
and intrapersonal domains (McCrae and Costa, 1987; Goldberg, 1993).
It is based on the lexical hypothesis, which suggests that language evolves
to characterize the most salient dimensions of human behavior, and so by
analyzing language and the way we use it to describe ourselves or others
it is possible to identify the fundamental ways in which people differ from
one another (Allport and Odbert, 1936). Based on a review of English
dictionaries, psychologists identified personality-describing adjectives and
developed many instruments to measure these characteristics. Multiple,
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