MindShift » grit

Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick

Katrina Schwartz — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:00:36 +0000

Flickr: Woodleywonderworks

How to praise kids: It’s a hot topic for many parents and educators. A lot of the conversation around it has stemmed from studies by Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford who has been researching this specific topic for many years.

“My research shows that praise for intelligence or ability backfires,” said Dweck, who co-authored a seminal research paper on the effects of praise on motivation and performance. “What we’ve shown is that when you praise someone, say, ‘You’re smart at this,’ the next time they struggle, they think they’re not. It’s really about praising the process they engage in, not how smart they are or how good they are at it, but taking on difficulty, trying many different strategies, sticking to it and achieving over time.”

But what some might not know is that this paradox is strongest for girls.

Dweck’s research, which focuses on what makes people seek challenging tasks, persist through difficulty and do well over time, has shown that many girls believe their abilities are fixed, that individuals are born with gifts and can’t change. Her research finds that when girls think this way, they often give up, rather than persisting through difficulties. They don’t think they possess the ability to improve, and nowhere is the phenomenon stronger than in math.

“Of all the subjects on earth, people think math is the most fixed,” Dweck said. “It’s a gift, you either have it or you don’t. And that it’s most indicative of your intelligence.” This attitude presents an especially sticky problem to educators working to boost girls’ interest and passion for science, technology, engineering and math – STEM subjects. For many boys, believing math is a fixed ability doesn’t hamper achievement — they just assume they have it, Dweck said. But girls don’t seem to possess that same confidence, and in their efforts to achieve perfection, Dweck’s research shows they shy away from subjects where they might fail.

[RELATED READING: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype]

“We have research showing that women who believe math is an acquired set of skills, not a gift you have or don’t have, fare very well,” Dweck said. “Even when they have a period of difficulty and even when they’re in an environment that they say is full of negative stereotyping.” This research suggests parents and educators should rethink what implicit and explicit messages are being sent to young girls about achievement.

If adults emphasize that all skills are learned through a process of engagement, value challenge and praise efforts to supersede frustration rather than only showing excitement over the right answer, girls will be show resilience. It also might help to provide a roadmap to correct the gender imbalance that already exists in fields requiring math and science, jobs that often involve setbacks, “failing,” and overcoming challenges.

“The kids who are getting this process praise, those are the kids who want the challenge.”

Dweck has found that socialization and beliefs about learning ability are developed at early ages. “Mother’s praise to their babies, one to three years of age, predicts that child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” Dweck said. “It doesn’t mean it is set in stone, but it means that kind of value system — what you’re praising, what you say is important — it’s sinking in. And the kids who are getting this process praise, strategy and taking on hard things and sticking to them, those are the kids who want the challenge.”

Dweck understands it isn’t easy to praise process and emphasize the fun in challenging situations. Kids like direct praise, but to Dweck lauding achievement is like feeding them junk food – it’s bad for them.

[RELATED READING: How Important is Grit in Student Achievement?]

An implicit argument here is that failure in small doses is good. Dweck’s not the first person to make that argument; advocates of game-based learning say one of its strongest attributes lies in a player’s ability to fail and start over without being stigmatized. Students learn as they go, getting better each time they attempt a task in the game. But the current education system leaves little room for failure, and consequently anxious parents often don’t tolerate small setbacks either.

“If you have little failures along the way and have them understand that’s part of learning, and that you can actually derive useful information about what to do next, that’s really useful,” Dweck said.

She believes families should sit around the dinner table discussing the day’s struggles and new strategies for attacking the problem. In life no one can be perfect, and learning to view little failures as learning experiences, or opportunities to grow could be the most valuable lesson of all.

How to Foster Grit, Tenacity and Perseverance: An Educator’s Guide

Tina Barseghian — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:45:47 +0000

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How can we best prepare children and adolescents to thrive in the 21st century? This question is at the heart of what every educator attempts to do on a daily basis. Apart from imparting content of knowledge and facts, however, it’s becoming clear that the “noncognitive competencies” known as grit, perseverance, and tenacity are just as important, if not more so, in preparing kids to be self-sufficient and successful.

To that end, the Department of Education’s Office of Technology has released a report called Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance —Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century, drafted by research firm SRI International, which addresses how educators can integrate these ideas into their teaching practice: Are these competencies malleable and teachable? How significant a role do they play in students’ success? What are the best learning environments to encourage and foster these attributes?

“The test score accountability movement and conventional educational approaches tend to focus on intellectual aspects of success, such as content knowledge. However, this is not sufficient,” the report states. “If students are to achieve their full potential, they must have opportunities to engage and develop a much richer set of skills.”

The entire report [PDF] is well worth the read. Here are a few noteworthy highlights excerpted from different parts of the report.

What Are Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance?

Grit, tenacity, and perseverance are multifaceted concepts encompassing goals, challenges, and ways of managing these. We integrate the big ideas from several related definitions in the literature to a broad, multifaceted definition of grit for the purpose of this report: “Perseverance to accomplish long-term or higher-order goals in the face of challenges and setbacks, engaging the student’s psychological resources, such as their academic mindsets, effortful control, and strategies and tactics.”

Sociocultural context plays an important role. It can be a significant determinant of what students value and want to accomplish, the types of challenges they face, and the resources they can access. It is well documented that students from high-poverty backgrounds are particularly likely to face great stress and limited social support for academic achievement— factors which can undermine perseverance toward a wide range of goals. Researchers and educators also highlight concerns about the challenges faced by students from other segments of the socioeconomic spectrum. For example, researchers and educators are exposing how grit can be detrimental when it is driven by a fear-based focus on testing and college entry. This can undermine conceptual learning, creativity, long-term retention, mental health, and ability to deal with “real-world” challenges.

Students can develop psychological resources that promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance. Our research pointed to three facets—all of which have been shown to be malleable and teachable in certain contexts:

Academic mindsets. These constitute how students frame themselves as learners, their learning environment, and their relationships to the learning environment. They include beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, values, and ways of perceiving oneself. Compelling evidence suggests that mindsets can have a powerful impact on academic performance in general, and in particular on how students behave and perform in the face of challenge. A core mindset that supports perseverance is called the “growth mindset”—knowing “My ability and competence grow with my effort.”
Effortful control. Students are constantly faced with tasks that are important for long-term goals but that in the short-term do not feel desirable or intrinsically motivating. Successful students marshal willpower and regulate their attention during such tasks and in the face of distractions. While this can seem austere or “no fun,” research shows that students stronger in these skills are happier and better able to handle stress.
Strategies and tactics. Students are also more likely to persevere when they can draw on specific strategies and tactics to deal with challenges and setbacks. They need actionable skills for taking responsibility and initiative, and for being productive under conditions of uncertainty—for example, defining tasks, planning, monitoring, changing course of action, and dealing with specific obstacles.

Measuring Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance

There are many different types of measurement methods, each with important tradeoffs.

Self-report methods typically ask participants to respond to a set of questions about their perceptions, attitudes, goals, emotions, beliefs, and so on. Advantages are that they are easy to administer and can yield scores that are easy to interpret. Disadvantages are that people are not always valid assessors of their own skills, and self-reports can be intrusive for evaluating participants’ in-the-moment perceptions during tasks.

Informant reports are made by teachers, parents, or other observers. Advantages are that they can sidestep inherent biases of self-report and provide valuable data about learning processes. The main disadvantage is that these measures can often be highly resource- intensive—especially if they require training observers, time to complete extensive observations, and coding videos or field notes.

School records can provide important indicators of perseverance over time (e.g., attendance, grades, test scores, discipline problems) across large and diverse student samples. Advantages are the capacity to identify students who are struggling to persevere and new possibilities for rich longitudinal research. Disadvantages are that these records themselves do not provide rich information about individuals’ experiences and nuances within learning environments that may have contributed to the outcomes reported in records.

Behavioral task performance measures within digital learning environments can capture indicators of persistence or giving up. Advantages are that new methods can be seamlessly1 Some people equate “dispositions” with traits that people are born with and/or cannot change. In this brief, and particularly in the context of measurement, we use the term to mean enduring tendencies, independent of any claims about their origin or malleability. The extent to which dispositions are changeable, malleable, or teachable will be highly dependent on what the disposition is and the nature of the opportunities that individuals encounter.

Programs and Models for Learning Environments to Promote Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance

We reviewed approximately 50 programs and models for promoting grit, tenacity, and perseverance, and developed five conceptual clusters based on targeted age level, learning environment, and which facets of the hypothesized model are addressed or leveraged. While there is still a need for more empirical evidence that these factors can be taught as transferable competencies across situations, there are a wide range of promising programs and approaches. The five conceptual clusters are as follows (discussed in detail in Chapter 4).

School readiness programs that address executive functions. These programs at the preschool and early elementary school levels help young children develop the effortful control that is necessary for the transition into formal schooling. Approaches include training with games, aerobic exercise and sports, martial arts and mindfulness practices, and classroom curricula and teacher professional development. Many programs have substantial empirical evidence of their success, and a major finding is that children best develop attention regulation and self-control when they can practice skills in a supportive environment that addresses cognitive, social, and physical development together.

Interventions that address mindsets, learning strategies, and resilience. There is growing research demonstrating that brief interventions (e.g., 2 to 10 hours) can significantly impact students’ mindsets and learning strategies, and, in turn, academic performance. Empirically based mindset interventions include activities that explicitly teach students to have a “growth mindset” (i.e., that intelligence grows with effort), help students frame difficulty not as personal failings but as important “bumps in the road” on the way to success, provide students opportunities to affirm their personal values to maintain clarity about why they are investing their efforts, help relate course materials to students’ lives, or incorporate multiple approaches to address different needs. Empirically based learning strategies interventions include those that help students clarify their goals and anticipate in advance how to deal with likely obstacles, develop general study skills, build a resource-rich social network, or develop content-specific metacognitive skills to monitor progress. Some programs build these types of skills as protective positive assets that support resilience in the face of adversity.

Alternative school models and school-level reform approaches. We reviewed three types of approaches. The “character education” models include explicit articulation of learning goals for targeted competencies, clear and regular assessment and feedback of student progress, intensive teacher professional development, and discourse about these competencies throughout the school culture. In the “project-based learning and design thinking” models, students develop competencies through engagement in long-term, challenging, and/or real-world problems that require planning, monitoring, feedback, and iteration. Mindsets are addressed inherently in processes of feedback and iteration, and projects are often aligned with students’ interests and passions. The third type of approach is that of organizations providing support for schoolwide improvement, such as teacher professional development, networks of school communities, and strategies to improve school organizational structure. There is strong anecdotal evidence of these models’ success, but further research is needed to determine impacts.

Informal learning programs. We reviewed informal learning programs that provide different kinds of support for persistence. Several provide structured social support networks for students who are the first in their families to go to college. Such programs provide academic support, community involvement, and guidance in the processes of college exploration, application, and initial college adjustment. Other types of programs focus on activities to spark and support interest and persistence in STEM professions. Many programs are beginning to teach explicitly about grit, drawing on models similar to those discussed in the character education models above. In most cases, there is strong anecdotal evidence of their success, but further research is needed to determine impacts.

Digital learning environments, online resources, and tools for teachers. We reviewed educational technologies aligned with each aspect of the hypothesized model: digital learning environments that provide optimal challenge through adaptivity; digital tools to help educators promote a rigorous and supportive classroom climate; resources, information, materials, tools, or human capital to accomplish difficult goals; motivating learning environments that trigger interest; teaching about academic mindsets; promoting learning strategies; and promoting the development of effortful control. Data is available showing impacts of many of these technologies.

Learning Environments That Promote Grit

When students have big and important goals, educators can promote perseverance by providing support. Just as there is an array of types of goals, there is also a wide variety of challenges, setbacks, obstacles, and adversities that students may encounter in pursuit of their goals. We first examine this variety of challenges, and then take a close look at two dimensions of learning environments that can be important for supporting perseverance.

There are a variety of different types of challenges and setbacks, many with extremely different implications for the resources necessary to persevere. Examples follow:

Conceptual complexity or lack of tactical knowledge. When the goals are around learning content, many students are challenged by the conceptual complexity. Students may also be challenged by lack of tactical knowledge about how to handle new or large goals that require planning and monitoring, for example, a long-term inquiry-based science project or taking the steps necessary throughout high school to get into college.
More dominant distractions, lack of intrinsic motivation, boredom. No matter how worthy a long-term goal may be, students will encounter particular subtasks or periods of time when other activities, such as surfing the Internet or hanging out with friends, may seem much more attractive in the short-term. Inevitably, students face choices about how they will spend their time and focus their attention.
Lack of resources. Time, materials, and human resources can be essential for accomplishing many goals. Lack of resources can be a critical obstacle to a wide range of goals.
Adverse circumstances. Students of all socioeconomic backgrounds may face adverse circumstances, such as illness, bullying, neighborhood violence, family difficulties, social alienation or racism, moving to a new school, and so on. It can be challenging to maintain focus and direction toward long-term goals in the face of such obstacles.While these categories are not meant to be exhaustive, they begin to point to the types of resources that students will need as they face big goals. Here we discuss two dimensions— cultural and tangible resources.Supportive and rigorous learning environment culture. The National Research Council 2003 report, Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students’ Motivation to Learn, includes an extensive review of the research literature on how to set up learning environments to support motivation for the nation’s most vulnerable students. According to this report, cultures are supportive when they have the following characteristics: (1) they promote beliefs about competence, (2) they promote relevant values and goals, and (3) they promote social connectedness and belonging.

Students will persist more when they perceive that they are treated fairly and with respect, and adults show they care about them.

Students will persist more when teachers, administrators, and others in the school environment have high expectations for students’ success and hold students to high standards. These can be conveyed explicitly or implicitly. When remedial support is necessary, it is provided in ways that do not feel punitive or interfere with opportunities to engage in other interest-driven activities.

Evaluation of student performance should be carefully designed not to undermine perceptions of competence and future expectations. It should be based on clearly defined criteria, provide specific and useful feedback, and be varied to give students opportunities to demonstrate competence in different ways.

Extrinsic rewards and punishments that undermine intrinsic motivation should be avoided. Authoritarian discipline policies that limit students’ options and opportunities for self-expression undermine intrinsic motivation and persistence.

The Dark Side of Grit

Persevering in the face of challenges or setbacks to accomplish goals that are extrinsically motivated, unimportant to the student, or in some way inappropriate for the student can potentially induce stress, anxiety, and distraction, and have detrimental impacts on students’ long-term retention, conceptual learning, and psychological well-being.

As grit becomes a more popular notion in education, there is a risk that poorly informed educators or parents could misuse the idea and introduce what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error”—the tendency to overvalue personality-based explanations for observed behaviors and undervalue situational explanations. In other words, there is a risk that individuals could overattribute students’ poor performance to a lack of “grittiness” without considering that critical supports are lacking in the environment.

Perseverance that is the result of a “token economy” that places a strong emphasis on punishments and rewards may undermine long-term grit; in particular, while these fundamentally manipulative supports can seem to “work” in the short-run, when students go to a different environment without these supports, they may not have developed the appropriate psychological resources to continue to thrive.

In our interview with psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford University, she discussed an emerging trend that many undergraduate students have developed the expectation that their decisions about their studies and professional direction must come from an inherent “passion”—rather than through the effort and work of fully engaging in what they are doing. While a rare few may be driven by specific passions, for many students, this expectation is false and can undermine their persistence when they begin to encounter challenges in a chosen direction.

How Free Play Can Define Kids’ Success

Katrina Schwartz — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 18:44:02 +0000

Free, unstructured playtime gives kids a chance to discover their interests and tap into their creativity. It’s a crucial element for building resilience in children, an attribute they’ll need in order to become happy, productive adults. That’s Kenneth Ginsburg’s thesis and the core of his book Building Resilience in Children and Teens.

Ginsburg, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who also works with homeless children, has spent a lot of time trying to help young people build tools they’ll need to succeed — even when trauma has marred early lives.

But the word “success” can be loaded, often carrying different connotations. To Ginsburg, a successful child is one who finds something he loves to do, is generous, empathetic and compassionate, committed to repairing the world, shows grit and the ability to collaborate, creativity and can take constructive criticism. These are what will serve young people as they move into the world on their own.

“Play is integral to being able to build resilience.”

“So many of the things that we care about are completely learned through the creative process,” Ginsberg said at an event hosted by the Bay Area Discovery Museum. When kids are allowed free time to play, they learn how to work in groups, negotiate, share, self-advocate, and make decisions.

Ginsburg cautions parents that putting too much pressure on children’s academics might have negative effects in the long term. The way he frames parents’ ultimate goals: Raise healthy, wise 35-year-olds. Parenting with long-term vision helps keep the little things in perspective.

[RELATED READING: Are We Wringing the Creativity Out of Kids?]

“All the best ideas haven’t been thought of yet. If you have people who are only thinking about fitting in the box, then you aren’t going to get ideas outside the box,” Ginsburg said. Parents and educators shouldn’t be trying to shape children into cogs for an economy that hasn’t figured out what kind of machine it will be in 20 years.

Instead, one of the most important skills a parent can foster in children is resilience, which he says can be fostered through creativity. Ginsburg relies on the “Seven C’s of Resilience” as a road map for helping students to find their inner grit.

7 C’s of Resilience

1) COMPETENCE: Young people need to be recognized when they’re doing something right and to be given opportunities to develop specific skills.
2) CONFIDENCE: Confidence comes from building real skills that parents and educators can teach and nurture. Confidence can be easily undermined, but also bolstered by tasks that push learners without making the goal feel unachievable.
3) CONNECTION: Being part of a community helps kids know they aren’t alone if they struggle and that they can develop creative solutions to problems.
4) CHARACTER. Kids need an understanding of right and what wrong and the capacity to follow a moral compass. That will allow them see that they cannot be put down.
5) CONTRIBUTION: The experience of offering their own service makes it easier for young people to ask for help when they need it. Once kids understand how good it can feel to give to others, it becomes easier to ask for that same support when it’s needed. And being willing to ask for help is a big part of being resilient.
6) COPING: Kids need to learn mechanisms to manage their stress by learning methods to both engage and disengage at times. Some strategies for doing this include breaking down seemingly insurmountable problems into smaller, achievable pieces, avoiding things that trigger extreme anxiety, and just letting some things go. After all, resilience is about conserving energy to fit the long game and kids need to know realistically what they can affect and what should be let go.
7) CONTROL: In order to truly be resilient a child need to believe that she has control over her world. Feeling secure helps engender control, which is why kids test limits.

Creativity plays an integral part of developing these seven skill sets. “Play is exactly about learning to control your environment, to figure things out,” he said. “Play is integral to being able to build resilience.” When kids play, they make mistakes and learn how to recover. It’s also a unique time for parents to observe their children and offer gentle guidance about skill development or how to share.

Keeping children on rigid, academically driven schedules denies them the space for some of the real self-learning that will see them through unexpected challenges, the ones that aren’t on the test.

How Important is Grit in Student Achievement?

MindShift — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:57:08 +0000

When it comes to high achievement, grit may be as essential as intelligence.

By Emily Hanford, American RadioWorks

Before she was a psychology professor, Angela Duckworth taught math in middle school and high school. She spent a lot of time thinking about something that might seem obvious: The students who tried hardest did the best, and the students who didn’t try very hard didn’t do very well. Duckworth wanted to know: What is the role of effort in a person’s success?

Now Duckworth is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and her research focuses on a personality trait she calls “grit.” She defines grit as “sticking with things over the very long term until you master them.” In a paper, she writes that “the gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina.”

Duckworth’s research suggests that when it comes to high achievement, grit may be as essential as intelligence. That’s a significant finding because for a long time, intelligence was considered the key to success.

“Which experiences do we give kids to get them in the direction of more grit and not less?”

Intelligence “is probably the best-measured trait that there is in all of human psychology,” says Duckworth. “We know how to measure intelligence in a matter of minutes.”

But intelligence leaves a lot unexplained. There are smart people who aren’t high achievers, and there are people who achieve a lot without having the highest test scores. In one study, Duckworth found that smarter students actually had less grit than their peers who scored lower on an intelligence test. This finding suggests that, among the study participants — all students at an Ivy League school — people who are not as bright as their peers “compensate by working harder and with more determination.” And their effort pays off: The grittiest students — not the smartest ones — had the highest GPAs.

THE GRIT TEST

Duckworth’s work is part of a growing area of psychology research focused on what are loosely called “noncognitive skills.” The goal is to identify and measure the various skills and traits other than intelligence that contribute to human development and success.

Duckworth has developed a test called the “Grit Scale.” You rate yourself on a series of 8 to 12 items. Two examples: “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” and “Setbacks don’t discourage me.” It’s entirely self-reported, so you could game the test, and yet what Duckworth has found is that a person’s grit score is highly predictive of achievement under challenging circumstances.

QUESTIONS FROM THE GRIT TEST:

New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.
Setbacks don’t discourage me.
I have achieved a goal that took years of work.
I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.

At the elite United States Military Academy, West Point, a cadet’s grit score was the best predictor of success in the rigorous summer training program known as “Beast Barracks.” Grit mattered more than intelligence, leadership ability or physical fitness.

At the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the grittiest contestants were the most likely to advance to the finals — at least in part because they studied longer, not because they were smarter or were better spellers.

GRIT AND COLLEGE COMPLETION

Angela Duckworth is now turning her attention to the question of grit and college completion. In a study funded by the Gates Foundation, Duckworth and a number of other researchers are trying to understand what predicts college persistence among graduates of several high-performing urban charter school networks: YES Prep Public Schools in Houston, Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia, Aspire Public Schools in California and Achievement First Schools in Connecticut.

These charter school networks serve mostly students from low-income and minority families. The schools were founded to close the “achievement gap” between these students and their higher-income peers. The ultimate goal of these charter school networks is to get students to go to college and earn degrees.

The charter schools have succeeded in providing strong academic preparation. Most of their students go to college. Yet the students graduate from college at lower rates than would be expected based on their academic preparation.

The charter schools want to know why that is. Angela Duckworth wants to know if grit has anything to do with it.

Duckworth’s previous research shows that people who have “some college” but no degree are lower in grit than people who have college degrees. Does that mean the charter school students who are not making it through college are lacking grit? And if that’s the case, can grit be learned?

These are complicated questions, and the answers aren’t in yet. Duckworth says there are a number of things to think about before jumping to the conclusion that students who don’t finish college aren’t gritty. Many factors contribute to college success, including money, what colleges students go to, and what Duckworth calls “social-psychological” barriers. She says low-income and minority students often feel out of place on college campuses, especially more elite colleges where the majority of students are upper- income, white and have college-educated parents. Duckworth thinks a sense of social belonging may be key to persisting through college. One of her research goals is to “sharpen insights” about the psychological barriers that prevent well-prepared students from completing degrees — and to test interventions that might help students overcome those barriers.

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But Duckworth thinks grit is likely a significant factor when it comes to college completion among the charter school students she is studying. That’s because grit is a particularly helpful trait when it comes to challenging experiences, and for the charter school students, college tends to be a challenging experience.

Most of the students are first generation; their parents didn’t go to college — in many cases, no one in their family has any experience with higher education. College can be a difficult and confusing experience even for people who come from college-educated families, but for first-generation students, college is like learning a new language, says Tenesha Villanueva, a co-director of alumni programs at YES Prep Public Schools in Houston.

“It’s like going to a foreign country and trying to navigate systems and programs that you have never come in contact with before,” says Villanueva.

When first-generation students come up against obstacles in college, they have no one in their families to turn to for help, says Villanueva. College-educated families provide their students with support that many students and families may not even be aware of, but it’s a powerful force that helps propel students through college. Villanueva says first-generation students are at a disadvantage.

Not only do first-generation students lack the kind of family support that can help them overcome obstacles in college, they also tend to face more obstacles than higher-income students from college-educated families, according to Villanueva and her colleagues at YES Prep. They may have trouble with money or financial aid paperwork. A lot of the students have to work while going to school. Many live at home and have family obligations, such as taking care of siblings or grandparents and helping to pay the bills. Research shows all of these things make going to college harder and increase the chances a student will quit.

YES Prep graduated its first class of seniors 11 years ago. So far 40 percent of the students have earned bachelor’s degrees within six years of finishing high school. Twenty-eight percent have dropped out. The rest are still in college, gritting it out years after they were expected to finish.

THE GRITTIEST COLLEGE STUDENTS

When college is hard, grit helps, according to Angela Duckworth’s research.

In fact, people who succeed in getting associate’s degrees are, on average, more gritty than people who get bachelor’s degrees, according to Duckworth’s research. It takes as much grit to get an associate’s degree as it does to get a Ph.D.

“Graduating from a two-year college versus a four-year college is a much greater difference than people might imagine,” says Duckworth.

Community colleges are full of students who are a lot like the students at YES Prep and the other urban charter schools Duckworth is studying: first-generation college students from poor families who have to balance work and family while going to school. The community college dropout rate is high.

“If you’re going to get through a two-year college where the attrition rate is 50 or maybe even 75 percent, maybe you do need more grit to surmount all those obstacles,” says Duckworth.

University of Pennsylvania

Angela Duckworth

LEARNING TO BE GRITTY

It’s not clear what makes some people grittier than others, but Angela Duckworth believes grit is something people can probably learn.

She says every human quality that has been studied has proven to be affected at least in part by a person’s environment — even intelligence. In addition, people change over time.

“Think about things about your personality like, ‘I’m a pretty extroverted person,’” says Duckworth. “Well, how fixed is that?”

It turns out a personality trait like extroversion can change a lot over a person’s life. “If you look at large population data, people get more or less extroverted over time,” says Duckworth. “There’s no reason to think that grit is any different.”

She believes grit can wax and wane in response to experiences. In addition, people might be gritty about some things and not others.

“You can see a child be exceptionally self-disciplined about their basketball practicing, and yet when you see them in math class, they give up at the slightest frustration,” says Duckworth.

Donald Kamentz, director of college initiatives at YES Prep, says students he’s worked with are some of the grittiest people he’s ever met. They “deal with things and persevere through situations that most people would find insurmountable,” he says.

He’s known students who get jobs to pay the bills when their parents are laid off, or figure out how to get the electricity back on when the power company shuts it off.

“And then they go to college and they’re struggling with financial aid or their financial aid didn’t come through and they don’t know what to do,” he says. Some of them drop out when confronted with these kinds of challenges. He says they’re not gritty enough when it comes to college.

A question for YES Prep and other charter schools in Duckworth’s study is not necessarily how to get students to be gritty, but how to get them to be gritty about college completion.

“Which experiences do we give kids to get them in the direction of more grit and not less?” asks Duckworth.

One of the goals of Duckworth’s research is to figure this out. Her current project began in the fall of 2011 and is scheduled to wrap up in 2014.