ArticleNature human behaviour2018
A systematic review and meta-analysis of effects of early life non-cognitive skills on academic, psychosocial, cognitive and health outcomes.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Relationships between Child Development at School Entry and Adolescent Health-A Participatory Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Pooled it
- Improving child mental health and learning outcomes and reducing stigma and discrimination in conflict setting: findings from a cluster randomized controlled trial of a classroom-based psychosocial intervention in rural primary schools in Afghanistan.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Trial
- Cognitive control training with domain-general response inhibition does not change children's brains or behavior.Nature neuroscience · 2024Trial
- Association Between Family Meal Frequency and Social and Emotional Skills Among Chinese Adolescents: Evidence from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS).Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Non-cognitive skills mediate education-related polygenic score associations with academic achievement across development.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Beyond standardized measures: a mixed-methods pilot study of integrated non-cognitive skills training in German upper secondary students.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- From genetic disposition to academic achievement: The mediating role of non-cognitive skills across development.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Non-cognitive ability and relative poverty in farmer households: an empirical study from rural China.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Parent-Child Relationships and Adolescents' Non-Cognitive Skills: Role of Social Anxiety and Number of Friends.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Interaction of family SES with children's genetic propensity for cognitive and noncognitive skills: No evidence of the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis for educational outcomes.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2024Article
- Neurochemical Predictors of Generalized Learning Induced by Brain Stimulation and Training.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Socioeconomic inequalities in cardiovascular disease: a causal perspective.Nature reviews. Cardiology · 2024Review
- Self-regulatory control processes in youths: A temporal network analysis approach.JCPP advances · 2024Article
- Unpacking the Experiences of Health Care Professionals About the Web-Based Building Resilience At Work Program During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Framework Analysis.JMIR medical education · 2024Article
- Econeurobiology and brain development in children: key factors affecting development, behavioral outcomes, and school interventions.Frontiers in public health · 2024Review
- Article
- Association of early bedtime at 3 years of age with higher academic performance and better non-cognitive skills in elementary school.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Associations of health literacy, personality traits, and pro-individualism with the willingness to complete advance directives in Taiwan.BMC palliative care · 2023Article
- Predicting Effortful Control at 3 Years of Age from Measures of Attention and Home Environment in Infancy: A Machine Learning Approach.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Longitudinal associations between positive attributes and psychopathology and their interactive effects on educational outcomes.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Success in school and the labour market relies on more than high intelligence. Associations between "non-cognitive" skills in childhood, such as attention, self-regulation, and perseverance, and later outcomes have been widely investigated. In a systematic review of this literature, we screened 9553 publications, reviewed 554 eligible publications, and interpreted results from 222 better quality publications. Better quality publications comprised randomised experimental and quasi-experimental studies (EQIs), and observational studies that made reasonable attempts to control confounding. For academic achievement outcomes there were 26 EQI publications but only 14 were available for meta-analysis with effects ranging from 0.16 to 0.37SD. However, within sub-domains effects were heterogeneous. The 95% prediction interval for literacy was consistent with negative, null and positive effects (-0.13 to 0.79). Similarly heterogeneous findings were observed for psychosocial, cognitive and language, and health outcomes. Funnel plots of EQIs and observational studies showed asymmetric distributions and potential for small study bias. There is some evidence that non-cognitive skills associate with improved outcomes. However, there is potential for small study and publication bias that may over-estimate true effects, and heterogeneity of effect estimates spanned negative, null and positive effects. The quality of evidence from EQIs under-pinning this field is lower than optimal and more than a third of observational studies made little or no attempt to control confounding. Interventions designed to develop children's non-cognitive skills could potentially improve outcomes. The inter-disciplinary researchers interested in these skills should take a more strategic and rigorous approach to determine which interventions are most effective.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.