Researchers, theorists, and practitioners have expressed a renewed interest in the longitudinal dynamics of personality characteristics in adulthood, including organic life span trajectories and their amenability to volitional change. However, this research has apparently not yet expanded to include the Dark Triad (psychopathy, narcissism,…

Robust investment in early childhood education can help expand children's access to high-quality pre-K programs. These investments can also strengthen the ability of educators to gather valuable information about young children's behaviors, skills, and competencies in order to make better decisions about how to support their learning and…

If educators want to create a learning environment that promotes authenticity, empathy must be embedded into instruction. This requires students to understand intersectionality and acknowledge discrimination, condescension or oppression, open or hidden, macro or micro, that people experience day-to-day. In this article, the authors define empathy,…

Context: Athletic training programs are required to incorporate the development of many foundational skills and behaviors into the curriculum. Athletic training students must develop soft skills such as effective communication, exhibiting empathy, dependability, and integrity, which are all associated with quality athletic trainers. Objective: To…

Recent papers on career and college readiness have emphasized preparation of secondary students for either future college and/or career choices (Robles, 2012, Rateau, Kaufman & Cletzer, 2015). While technologies used in business change rapidly and make the teaching of job-specific skills somewhat impractical, the foundational skills needed for…

In the fall of 2019, 3,117 15-year-old students in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) participated in the Study on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES), part of an international effort led by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with Houston serving as the only U.S. site. This report provides a snapshot of…

Does the current drive to incorporate social and emotional learning (SEL) into the K-12 curriculum represent a positive reform that will lead schools to educate the "whole student" and ultimately boost young people's academic success? Or is it a distracting fad that comes with high opportunity costs? Common sense and considerable…

People use various terms to refer to traits and tendencies connected to social-emotional behavior and ways of thinking or approaching problems--from 21st century skills to mindsets to habits of mind. Such traits are also often called soft skills or non-cognitive skills. The authors contend that these latter terms imply that these traits and…

Gifted individuals have unique social and emotional needs that often manifest as challenging interpersonal behavior. Chief among these needs are the fact that gifted students tend to be quite emotionally intense and that they tend to be quite cognitively rigid. Emotional intensity is defined as having stronger, more frequent, more complex, and…

The nation's PK-12 education ecosystem is poised to embrace programs intended to enhance soft skills. Soft skills are generally defined by exclusion as personal qualities other than the formal knowledge transmitted by schools that affect student adjustment, i.e., the effort that students put into their work and their social skills. Such soft…

U.S. high school graduation rates have risen steadily for the past decade, hitting an all-time high of 82 percent in 2013-14 (Rich, 2015). Yet there's a dark cloud behind this silver lining. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education (2015), only 59 percent of students who enter four-year colleges complete their…

This article proposes a conceptual framework for how education can promote adolescent girls' empowerment and, by mapping the field, highlights promising examples of empowering education programs. We conclude by identifying both research and programmatic opportunities for the future that will harness the expertise of a range of specialists from the…

Participation in athletics provides student-athletes a place to develop autonomy and grow socially through interactions with peers, parents, and coaches (Torres & Hager 2013). Coaches entrusted by parents to guide and nurture their child's sport experience fulfill the role of teacher, counselor, colleague, mentor, supervisor, and leader…

When this author first started graduate school, she was an incurable snoop--deeply curious about the lifestyles of her professors. She looked through the bookcases in their offices, studied the clutter on their desks, and asked personal questions about everything from how they balanced work with family to how many hours they slept at night. She…

"Donors don't give to causes; they give to people with causes." This often-cited saying rings true and emphasizes that the donor is influenced largely by the personality, professionalism, and character of the asker. The interpersonal skills of development officers and key volunteers are critical to development of relationships with donors, a fact…