Secondary Education and Teaching Commons^™

Teaching Non-Cognitive Skills For College: A Qualitative Case Study Of A Low-Income, High-Minority, Urban School District In Southeastern United States, Elizabeth Byron

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Capstones

This instrumental, multisite case study examines the role of secondary teachers in preparing high school students for the non-cognitive skills needed to persist in and graduate from college, using Bourdieu’s (1984) and Lin’s (1999) social capital theory as a guiding framework. Non-cognitive skills are defined as the “behaviors, thoughts, and feelings” of students (Borghans, 2008). Data collection for this study is based on semi-structured interviews via telecommunications with secondary educators and postsecondary student success practitioners and electronic archived documentation of non-cognitive skills found to be important for college success by the interviewees. In this study, college success is defined as …