Strategic Competences and Academic Success. Linearity and Profiles

The essay sets out from the commonsense perception that solid mastery of soft skills – such as strategic competences – is associated with success in education, the workplace, and life more generally. Nevertheless, empirical research suggests that strategic competences and learning outcomes are only moderately correlated. Hypothesizing that the findings of past studies may have depended, at least in part, on data analysis techniques that assumed a linear relationship between the two groups of variables, the authors of this chapter investigated the association between differing degrees of selfperceived strategic competence and different levels of academic performance. A dataset obtained by administering a reading comprehension test, a maths test, and the QSA (Pellerey, 1996) to 1,012 students at seven upper secondary schools was subjected to cluster analysis, leading to the identification of four groups: students who were likely to have special educational needs, students with poor motivation and a low level of school well-being, students who likely need to further develop certain cognitive strategic competences, and students with a medium-high “scholastic disposition”. These outcomes can usefully inform the individualization of both school programs and the ad hoc fostering of strategic competences.