Séminaire de Chiara Meneghetti : Soft skills, study-related factors and academic achievement

Jeudi 5 juillet 2023

Résumé 1:

Soft skills are abilities/capacities that a person uses to regulate his/her behaviours, thoughts, and feelings in specific situations. These abilities allow to regulate emotions, learn from experience, manage goal-directed behaviors, build and maintain good social relationships (Soto et al., 2021). They are important for a series of everyday activities, as work success. One of the activities where they can have a role is academic achievement, an outcome that captures the students’academic work such as course grades or GPA. Most of literature has been focused on cognitive abilities (Roth et al., 2015) and stud-related factors in term of study strategies, motivational believes and emotions (Mega et al., 2014). Given that soft skills regulate emotions, behaviours, and cognition enabling people to achieve personal goals (Robles, 2012; Park et al., 2004) they might also regulate positive and functional behaviours/ thoughts/ emotions for school/university and learning. The talk presents the theoretical framework, definitions and example of self-reported measures of soft skills (as adaptability, initiative, perseverance, curiosity, leadership, and social awareness, creativity, and emotion regulation). Through the presentation of four studies, I will present the role of soft skills in academic achievement (Feraco et al., 2022) and students’ wellbeing (Feraco et al., 2023; Casali et al. 2023a). Further the contribution of soft skills in academic achievement in learning disability (LD) students will be examined (Casali et al., 2023b). The results of path/regression models show that soft skills are related to relevant students’ outcomes in the general student population, with indication of similar relationships in students with LDs. Overall, these findings offer insights to better develop models based on empirical evidence on soft-skills and their structure, and to consider soft-skills in other domains and their malleability.

Biosketch du chercheur: