Education Commons^™

Comparing And Validating Measures Of Character Skills: Findings From A Nationally Representative Sample, Gema Zamarro, Albert Cheng, M. Danish Shakeel, Collin Hitt

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

Though researchers now are aware of the potential importance of character skills, such as conscientiousness, grit, self-control, and a growth mindset, researchers struggle to find reliable measures of these skills. In this paper, we use data collected from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative internet panel to study the validity of innovative measures of character skills based on measures of survey effort. We believe surveys themselves can be seen as a behavioral tasks and that respondents provide meaningful information about their character skills by way of the effort they put forward on surveys. In particular, we compare measures of …