What is the crucial to turning potential into performance? Why is it that some talented individuals fail to fulfil their early promise? Why do some students bloom later than others and go on to outperform everyone’s expectation? A psychologist in America has been investigating these questions and believes she is starting to discover the answer: it’s all about gritty you are.

Book durability & Self-Regulation teacher Workshop

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist and former teacher, is leading research into grit, something she explains as being a combination of passion and perseverance, determination and direction. Her findings are being a lot more and a lot more frequently applied in schools in America, and now in England too.

KEY STUDIES

Duckworth’s seminal grit study focused on two areas: the us military and a student spelling competition.

To be accepted at the united states military Academy at West Point, you have to be very clever, exceptionally fit and demonstrate exceptional leadership skills. From the lots of who apply, only a few who are chosen. But despite this arduous application process, nearly 10% of participants drop out after two months, with lots of citing the physical and mental toll of the training as a reason for leaving. The difference between those who quit and those who successfully complete training? Their levels of grit.

When investigating which children did best at a national spelling contest grit emerged as a crucial aspect figuring out which children would do best. The students who stuck with their practice and homework for longest did better. talent was still a aspect in these two studies, but it was what the participants did with it that mattered more.

In these studies, grit was determined using a self-report questionnaire where participants rated themselves. In the subsequent years, armed with each participants grit score, Duckworth and her team were able to successfully predict which participants would prosper Camiseta VfL Wolfsburg and which would fail. These findings advanced our knowledge about what might make people successful as it integrated separate concepts such as motivation and work-ethic into one construct.

Should we show grit in schools?

Keen to harness the findings of this new research (and off the back of this TED talk), a lot more and a lot more schools are trying to help their students become grittier. This has taken the form Camiseta Crystal Palace FC of workshops, guest-speakers, jobs and minimizing the taboo around failure and mistakes. This is being done to try and improve grades and develop crucial life skills.

But what effect does grit actually have on students’ test scores? A recent study found that student’s level of grit only accounted for 0.5% of their GCSE results – hardly a ringing endorsement. Angela Duckworth herself suggests that self-control is a better predictor of test scores than grit, and that grit may be a better predictor of not dropping out of school, instead of examination results (though a lot more research on the underlying mechanism as to why this may be the case is still needed).

The challenge relating to grit is can the findings from the military and spelling bee be applied in schools? For example, the military study was terrific at predicting which super-talented recruits would quit. but pupils have to stay at school until they are 16. Or how about the spelling bee, where the participants were already very inspired and high achieving? Does this apply to students in schools who have not been very successful previously?

There are also questions about whether applying grit interventions is the ideal fit for young children and teenagers. As mentioned, it is a self-report questionnaire. You score lower on the grit scale if you agree with the statement “my interests change from year to year”. but having changing interests is part of being a teenager – it’s a time when you are indicated to sample different things and explore what your enthusiasms and strengths are.

But just because grit has limited impact on examination results doesn’t indicate it has no value – teaching the value of passion and persistence, and how to nurture them is a helpful life skill. What’s more, even small changes can benefit lots Camiseta Atletico Mineiro of students. A recent review on 88 grit studies found that grit is “only moderately correlated with performance” and that interventions created to enhance grit may only have a small effect on success. However, the authors note that this sort of impact can have a very meaningful impact in the real world, “a grit intervention that increases the retention rate in college by even a single potential point would potentially benefit countless students”.

For her part, Angela Duckworth has preached caution on how people utilise her research. She acknowledges the value that talent and chance can play and says grit is an incomplete theory – but it is still an crucial one that needs additionally research.

Subtle and Stealthy

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