The Role of Non-Academic (Soft) Skills in Student Transition to Postsecondary Education: A Mixed Methods Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study is a sequential mixed methods explanatory examination of the role of soft (non-academic) skills in shaping student transition from high school to postsecondary education (PSE). Specifically, this study looked at students’ soft skills, such as logical thinking, communication, and attentiveness, assessed as part of the application system for those who applied to the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (FASE) undergraduate cohort in 2016, completed an Online Student Profile, and were admitted, and investigated the role of these skills in predicting further success and persistence in the program of study. The quantitative findings of this study revealed a weak positive and statistically significant association of students’ soft skills with first-semester sessional grade point average (SGPA) of first and second year and cumulative grade point average (CGPA). This association was not practically significant, however, and indicated a minimal predictive power of soft skills on SGPA and CGPA. The findings showed statistically significant differences in soft skills scores between groups based on background variables (e.g., gender and school type). The results from logistic regression of soft skills on time to graduation showed that students with higher logical thinking, written communication, communication average (oral and written), attentiveness, and total skills average are more likely to graduate within four years or, if they did a professional experience year, within five years. The qualitative findings, based on two interviews with each of nine participants representing a range of active and graduated students from different FASE cohorts and programs, revealed that participants viewed the transition to PSE as a complex and multifaceted process, with many different factors to negotiate. The findings indicated that participants entered the program with a solid foundation of soft skills acquired through various pre-postsecondary environments and experiences. Most participants had high efficacy beliefs, self-regulation, perseverance, logical thinking, and communication skills. The findings also demonstrated that participants were academically prepared. Transitioning into the program presented various difficulties for many participants. Nonetheless, they persisted by drawing on their soft and academic skills and adjusting their academic and career goals. Additionally, they were able to access various types of support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".