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1.     Why did they start?
They wanted to assess the validity of grit. They did this by assessing high school and college students' personality characteristics, self regulation, engagement, and achievement.

2.     Why is this research important?
This research evaluates the importance of grit and success.

3.     Is it justified (review of literature?)
Yes, it's justified because it's worth knowing if possessing "grit" will aid in higher achievment.

4.     What is the research question/s of interest (purpose/objectives) or hypothesis?
Goals of the present study:
(a) examine the factor structure of the most commonly used
grit measure in high school and college samples
(b) assess the overlap and distinctiveness of grit with constructs from the
personality, self-regulation, and engagement literatures
(c)Examine the relations between grit and later achievement outcomes,
specifically students’ grades, when other variables are controlled.

5.Terms defined?
Grit -one’s passion and perseverance toward long-term goals.
Future time perspective- the degree to which and the way in which the chronological future is integrated into the present life-space of an individual through motivational goal-setting processes.
Individual Interest- a relatively enduring predisposition to reengage particular contents over time.
Situational interest-triggered by current environmental stimuli
Conscientiousness -is one of the Big Five personality traits and is defined as being hardworking, responsible, self-disciplined, and thorough.
Cognitive self-regulation- includes cognitive learning strategies, such as planning, monitoring, regulating, and appraising before, during, and after performance.
Effort regulation - refers to students’ ability to maintain effort and
attention to tasks, even when they become uninteresting or there
are other distractions in the environment.

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1.     What did they do?
Series of questionnaires throughout the school day were completed by students. Students are given after completion scales measuring grit, self-control, engagement/disaffection with learning, and conscientiousness. Items within the scales were randomized. Grit was measured through these scales. Self regulation scales were measured by asking students to describe a specific class and then rate it by the scales provided.

2.     Sufficient details for the replication of the study?
Yes, the details are there, This study was after all performed on both a high school group of students, along with a college group of students. Replication is possible with other students at other times.

3.     What’s the study design?
Two samples, one college level and the other high school level. Both of the groups were given questionnaires. First to measure grit. Secondly to measure self-regulation, and last to measure grades.

4.     Have the data collection procedures and instruments described?
To collect the data for high school level, the students answers a serious of questionnaires. All provided on their personal iPads that each student had. GPA's were collected via school records. While college level students were sent an email from their professor to have them complete the survey on their own time. This level of students needed to give permission to the researchers to have their overall GPA. The scales and survey questions were collects and analyzed.

5.     Who is the sample population?
Participants were high school juniors (50.7% female) attending a private high school in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

Sample 2 - 336 undergrad students, (74.4% female)

6.     Does this population place any limits on the generalization of the results?
Yes, the population was primarily white, with the ethnic breakdown being: 61.6% White, 12.6% Black, 11.1% Biracial, 7.6% Latino, 4.5% Asian/Asian American, and 2.5% other. Thus, the results may not be representative of minorities.

Sample 2 -58% white, 18% Asian, 9% Black, 7% Latino, 6% Biracial, Thus, the results may not be representative of minorities.

7.     Was the sampling procedure/subject selection described? Sample size?
Yes, the participants were recruited via their classrooms through a partnership between researchers and administrators at the school. There were 203 students,  and the average age was 16.33 years (SD .51 years). Permission was granted from parents.

Sample 2 - College students were sent email from their professors, Average age was 20 years old, Permission was given to access personal information of the student via the school registrar.

8.     How was their sample assessed?
Through surveys within school establishments

9.     Was the measure validated?
Yes, all measures were clearly defined and validated through their findings

10.  Does the study design have any control group?
No.......

11.  Is the time frame adequate to answer the research question?
Time could play a huge part, although I don't think it really mattered all that much in this study. The surveys were distributed to the students at the end of a semester. I assume research was collected on a timely manner.

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1.  What did they find?
-In the college sample the bifactor model (posited grit as a single latent construct with two subscales) fit best, and in the high school sample the two-correlated model (posited consistency of interests or Grit-CI and perseverance of effort or Grit-PE) fit best.
- In Models 3 and 4 that tested directly the overlap of grit with individual constructs, high school participants’ Grit-CI overlapped most with effort regulation and behavioral disaffection. Effort regulation, which is defined as maintaining effort even when things become difficult or boring, is highly similar to Grit-CI, which focuses on maintaining interests in the face of setbacks or distractions.
-Models 3 and 4 in the college student sample showed that Grit-PE overlapped with self-control and conscientiousness, as would be expected given the conceptual similarities between Grit-PE and these personality constructs. However, cognitive self regulation, effort regulation, behavioral engagement, and behavioral disaffection overlapped more with Grit-CI than Grit-PE.
- For both high school and college students, perseverance of effort predicted grades more strongly than did consistency of interests.  However, in both samples effort regulation consistently predicted students’ grades more strongly than grit perseverance of effort did.

2.     Were the number of subjects in each group or subgroup used in the analysis specified?
Yes, they were, N = 203 (high school), 336 (college)

3.     Were the subject characteristics summarized?
Yes, everything was summarized in the results and discussion.

4.     Did the results relate to the specified objective/hypotheses?
Yes, all results related to original objectives/hypotheses.

5.     Do the tables and figures “speak for themselves?”
Yes, although the analysis of data helps to better understand the provided data.

6.     Are the tables adequately titled, labeled?
Yes, everything is labeled and titled.

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1.     Are they comprehensive and current?
Yes!

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1.     What do the results mean?
In both samples when the other psychological variables were included, other variables such as effort regulation and behavioral engagement were stronger
predictors of grades than grit.
They suggest some caution be taken in advocating grit interventions as a way of enhancing school performance.
The perseverance of effort component of grit predicts grades more strongly than consistency of interests.
2.Did authors discuss the results in relations to the objectives/hypotheses?
Yes, they suggested that perhaps some items on the Grit-S could be modified
to reflect more accurately the focus of the construct on more long-term goals. Additionally, policymakers and intervention researchers
should choose the variables on which they will intervene
(whether grit or others) in terms of their match to the outcomes
they hope to improve.
3.     Were the results discussed in relation to those from similar studies?
Yes, other studies were discussed and cited.

4.     Are the authors justified in the strength of the statements they make in the study?

5.     Did they offer alternative explanations for results?
Answered in question one.
*Think about including a Sakai question posts to promote our class discussion.

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Team Grit is better than Team Sports!

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The Power of Passion & Perseverance Video (6:00)

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The Power of Passion & Perseverance Video (6:00)

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Summarize this video and make a connection to the Muenks research article.
Duckworth held belief that every one of her students could learn the math material she was teaching as long as they tried long and hard enough. She noticed that IQ did not seem to explain difference between her "best" and "worst" students. She soon went back to graduate school to become a psychologist and conducted research in a variety of settings: at West Point, National Spelling Bee, private companies etc. and realized that in all of these different contexts, there was one characteristic that acted as a strong predictor of success: grit! She described grit as "passion and perseverance for very long-term goals." She then conducted research in Chicago public high schools and found that the higher grit was associated with higher graduation rates. Best answer to improving grit is growth mindset - the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, but can change with your own ef

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Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

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Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

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Engber, D. (2016).  Is “grit” really the key to success?  Slate.
Summarize this article and make a connection to the Muenks research article.

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A new book says you need passion and perseverance to achieve your goals in work and life. Is this a bold new idea or an old one dressed up to be the latest self-help sensation?

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Thinkstock.

In the summer of 2004, Angela Duckworth, then a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, went up to West Point to study 1,200 new cadets. The first-years were about to start "Beast Barracks," an infamous seven-week training program during which they'd toil in the classroom and on the field for 17 hours every day without a break. Many would drop out. Duckworth wanted to find out why some cadets managed to endure this challenge, while others just gave up.

Scientists have tried to solve this puzzle for more than 50 years, writes Duckworth in her new book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. But even the school's best means of screening its applicants-something called the "whole candidate score," a weighted mixture of a student's SATs, high school ranking, leadership ability, and physical fitness-does not anticipate who will succeed and who will fail at Beast. So Duckworth designed her own way of scoring candidates, giving each a survey that tested his or her willingness to persevere in pursuit of long-term goals. She called this measure "grit." And guess what? Grit worked. The cadets' survey answers helped predict whether they would make it through the grueling program.

Duckworth's best-seller peddles a pair of big ideas: that grit-comprising a person's perseverance and passion-is among the most important predictors of success and that we all have the power to increase our inner grit. These two theses, she argues, apply not just to cadets but to kids in troubled elementary schools and undergrads at top-ranked universities and to scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs. Duckworth's book describes a wide array of "paragons of grit," people she's either interviewed or studied from afar: puzzlemasters and magicians, actors and inventors, children and adults, Steve Young and Julia Child. Grit appears in all of them, sprinkled over their achievements like a magic Ajax powder. In tandem with some feisty scrubbing, it dissolves whatever obstacles might hold a person back.

While her book has only just arrived, Duckworth's gritty tales-and the endlessly extensible ideas they represent-have already spread throughout the country, into classrooms, boardrooms, and locker rooms alike. Popularized in a viral TED talk from 2013 and validated by that year's MacArthur "genius" grant, they've been inscribed into national education policy, and public school districts in California are grading kids-as well as schools themselves-on grit. Duckworth's message has been broadcast with such speed and thoroughness that other people even started selling books on grit before she published her own.

With Grit, Duckworth has now put out the definitive handbook for her theory of success. It parades from one essential topic to another on a float of common sense, tossing out scientific insights as it goes along. How to raise your kids, how to unearth your inner passion, how to find a higher purpose-like other self-help authors, Duckworth finds authoritative answers to these questions, promising to change how we see the world. And like other self-help authors, she pulls a sleight of hand by which even widely held assumptions end up looking like discoveries. It's as important to work hard, the book contends, as it is to be a natural talent. Who would disagree with that?

Zach Teris

Consider the recent run of best-selling pop-science books, often citing the same body of research, that purport to give us new, better, and more scientific ways to tweak our mindsets, get rid of our bad habits, and put in the 10,000 hours it takes to build a better life. Think of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success, or his earlier piece for the New Yorker on " The Talent Myth." Think of Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, about the false belief that "talent alone creates success-without effort." Think of Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, about the neurology and psychology of changing behavioral patterns through hard and steady work. Think of Roy Baumeister and John Tierney's Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, about how a person's self-control can be strengthened like a muscle.

These books convey the same optimistic message that you find in Grit: It's possible for all of us to change or, as one book puts it, to feel the triumph of a " neuroplastic transformation." They tell us that we needn't be the victims of our meager talents or our lousy genes.

The fact that this message can be written and rewritten in so many different ways and still find a following hints that Americans are a gritty bunch already. Who's more passionate and resilient-more a paragon of grit-than the earnest sap who spends 10,000 hours reading books that promise to change his life?

Still, good ideas will bear repeating. If Duckworth's premises are valid-first, that grit matters more than talent; and second, that it's possible to enhance your grit-then we ought to shout her message, and stream it, and push it even further up the best-seller list. If grit really works as both a diagnostic tool and a target for intervention, then it could help the elite and underprivileged alike. It could elevate the strivers to even greater heights, while pulling up the ones who are too often left behind.

But a closer look at Duckworth's seminal research, as well as some recent studies from her colleagues in the field, suggest there isn't much supporting evidence for either of her theses. It now appears that someone's grit, as compared with other, more familiar measures of her character, may not matter in determining success. And there's good reason to believe that intervening to enhance a person's passion and perseverance-"growing grit," as Duckworth calls it-would be highly inefficient.

You can expect to hear Duckworth's message many times in the weeks and months ahead, as it comes to dominate the culture of self-help: "Grit is good." This maxim hides shortcomings in the work, however, and it overlooks a crucial fact: The single-minded pursuit of single-mindedness may carry dangers of its own.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Thinkstock.

Up in the Hudson Valley, among the plebes at Beast Barracks, Duckworth found the secret of success. Students who identified with statements such as "Setbacks don't discourage me" and "I never give up" were more likely than their peers to make it through West Point's seven-week test of fortitude. (That's how grit is measured: Students assign themselves a score of 1 to 5 for each of 10 related character statements; the 10 scores are then averaged together.) This was Duckworth's first case study, and it delivered a clear and forceful message: If you want to make it through basic training, you gotta have grit.

Here's another less surprising way to frame the same research: Grit matters, but only in specific situations that require strength of will.

To make it through Beast, cadets must perform extraordinary feats of mental and physical stamina. They do pushups, situps, pullups, dips, flutter kicks, and arm claps; they have to run for miles every day; they're forced to hustle even as they move from one class to another. Is it any wonder that someone's whole candidate score, the measure that includes his SAT scores and his high-school grades, would have little bearing on his success or failure?

Duckworth likes to talk about "the marathon of life," as if we're all going through our own private versions of the training at West Point. But for most people, life may be less like a marathon than a series of sprints, interspersed with periods of rest, conversations with our friends, and hours upon hours spent browsing the internet.

Even the task of graduating from West Point itself doesn't really compare to the trials of Beast. When Duckworth looked at students' grades and "military performance scores" during their first year at school, she found that grit offered little guidance on how they'd handle the rest of the United States Military Academy curriculum. The whole candidate score-that old-fashioned, talent-based assessment-did much better. Considering that three-quarters of the students who fail to finish at West Point flunk during the post-Beast curriculum, those first seven gritty weeks appear to represent a special case, and one of marginal importance.

To show that the challenges of Beast stand in for those of life, Duckworth looked for grit in other settings, places where one might not expect to find endurance as a major factor in success. For one study, she surveyed 149 undergrads at the University of Pennsylvania, finding that the students' grit and SAT scores-the latter used as a proxy for their natural aptitude-were each and independently related to their school performance as measured by their grades. Even for these brainy Ivy Leaguers, grit seemed to be just as important as intelligence. Indeed, Duckworth writes that this was one of the key findings that led her to the "fundamental insight that would guide [her] future work."

For most people, life may be less like a marathon than a series of sprints, interspersed with periods of rest and hours upon hours spent browsing the internet.

There's a hitch in this analysis, though, one academics refer to as a " restriction of range." Duckworth was looking at a tiny sliver of the distribution of intelligence: Students in the Penn study group had an average SAT score of 1,415, putting them in the 96 th percentile nationwide. Since everyone in her study was superbright, even the very brightest weren't that much brighter than the rest of the group. That sort of bunching-up tends to make even robust correlations go away. To wit: We can all agree that, as a rule, being really tall correlates with scoring points while playing basketball. But if you look only at the players in the NBA, where the players' average height is 6-foot-7, that effect disappears -in the NBA, the tallest players aren't necessarily the highest scorers.

When everyone excels on one dimension-height, SAT scores- other factors will appear to play an outsize role. In the case of Duckworth's brainy Ivy Leaguers, this makes their SATs seem less important for predicting how they'll do in school and exaggerates the relative importance of their grit. If she'd mixed the same people in with a more balanced sample of their peers, let's say those with average SAT scores closer to 1,000, then the link between their aptitude and grades would have appeared more pronounced-and that would in turn have made the correlation with their grit seem less impressive.

In her paper on this research, Duckworth notes that the same issue might also work in the opposite direction: If the Ivy Leaguers were somewhat grittier than other kids, then the signs of their hard work would also be reduced in the analysis. Still, you'd expect this distortion to be more pronounced for the students' SATs, since we know they were selected for admission to the university precisely on the basis of those scores.

This isn't just an issue with one of Duckworth's studies. Another, in which she measured the grit of contestants in the National Spelling Bee, has similar range-restriction issues. (Her paper on the Ivy League and the National Spelling Bee research does acknowledge this concern, noting that it may "attenuate" the link between IQ and achievement.) But despite this shaky base of evidence, Grit doesn't merely claim that perseverance makes a difference. The book argues that it makes all the difference in the world.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Thinkstock.

Among Duckworth's major virtues as an author is her commitment to transparency. She never claims that she's identified a trait that no one has ever seen before, nor does she ignore all the other scientific measures of a person's character that overlap with the one that she invented. A person's grit, she would acknowledge, must not be so far off from what some might call her willpower, or others her resilience, or else perhaps her industriousness, impulse control, or fortitude. Duckworth also likens grit to other trendy latecomers to psychology: growth mindset and capacity for flow. In looking to the past, she mentions grit's relationship to sisu, a Finnish virtue that sustained the soldiers of the Winter War in 1939. She might have gone back much further still, to the factor known as w, meant to represent a person's " consistency of actions resulting from deliberate volition," which debuted in psychology in 1915.

In the book and elsewhere, Duckworth shows a noble willingness to piggyback her work on that of other researchers, explaining how they reach a common end. But that doesn't make this array of intersecting concepts any less bewildering. We're still left to wonder where, exactly, one might locate grit amid the rows and seedbeds of psychology. Does it represent a novel species, like the orchids and the dandelions (first described as mental types in 2008), or is it just a modern cultivar of something planted long ago?

That's long been a problem for personality psychologists, who often struggle with competing terms for common, underlying inclinations. The field had become a tangled mess by the 1950s and the 1960s, says Brent Roberts, a professor at the University of Illinois (whom Duckworth also cites). For any given outcome in a person's life-whether he might turn out to be a drunk, let's say, or a genius or a crook-researchers would devise a brand-new measure, calibrated to predict it. "It had a brutal elegance," Roberts says, "and I often pine for those days, to be honest with you."

But this rampant sowing of new ideas made it hard even for the specialists to find their way within the field. They didn't always know how their measures related to their colleagues' or if they might be duplicating one another's work. By the 1980s and the 1990s, lumpers in psychology had embraced a grand unified theory of personality, which collapsed all the nuances that came before into a set of supertraits-the Big Five. Under this new system, grit and all its near and distant cousins-willpower, superego strength, industriousness, and so on-would fall under an umbrella factor known as "conscientiousness." (The remaining four of the Big Five supertraits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.) Like grit, conscientiousness could be measured with a survey: a set of statements, maybe several hundred, for a person to read and then assign himself a score. (There are other ways to measure personality: A psychologist might ask people, for example, whether they engage in specific behaviors such as making lists or showing up early for meetings.)

"[The Big Five] brought clarity to a true buzz of confusion," Roberts says, and it allowed researchers to make bigger claims about the broad significance of character. A measure of someone's conscientiousness, for example, could help predict her longevity and physical health, as well as her marital stability. It could also tell you how likely she would be to find success in high school, college, and the workplace. But if the adoption of the Big Five proved useful in the lab, it made the science of personality harder to explain to outsiders. "When I say, conscientiousness," says Roberts, "people go, 'Huh?' "

That's why Duckworth worked so hard to give her measure a catchy name. "I came up with it over other terms like pluck, tenacity, persistence, perseverance," she said during one interview. "It has the connotations that I wanted. It sounds good." It's true: Conscientiousness comes off as something weak-a nerdy way of playing by the rules; grit suggests a vigorous, old-fashioned form of virtue. Grit's the antidote for an overpolished age, a return to rough-hewn authenticity. "It's brilliant in terms of marketing," says Roberts. "People understand it immediately."

Grit the measure and Grit the book are clearly triumphs of rebranding. It's not as easy to discern whether Duckworth has produced something more than that-a set of new and substantive ideas to match her innovative presentation. To put this another way: Is she the Alice Waters of psychology, the leader of a revolution, or is she the field's Rick Mast, more a pioneer of pretty packaging?

A brand-new meta-analysis of the literature on grit-conducted by researchers Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan, and Peter Harms using 88 samples and 67,000 subjects-provides some clues.* There isn't much space between Duckworth's measure and conscientiousness, the study argues. If you test a group of people for both traits, administering standard surveys to measure grit and conscientiousness, the results will end up very tightly linked; in some studies their relationship approaches 1-to-1. In Roberts' view, grit corresponds very closely to a facet, or subtrait, of conscientiousness that has for many years been called industriousness.

Duckworth acknowledges the similarities between grit and conscientiousness and says that both predict achievement. (Again, she's very forthright about the limitations of her work.) But she also argues that grit adds value to the other measures-that it's a better way of measuring success. The majority of recent research, though, conducted on students of different ages and in different countries says that argument is wrong.

The fact that grit may be little more than a new and glossy version of an old idea does not make it unimportant.

For one paper, from 2014, a pair of Yale psychologists looked at several hundred teenagers at a private high school in New England and checked scholastic outcomes (disciplinary record, grades, academic honors, etc.) against their measured grit, conscientiousness, and something called "emotion regulation ability." Only the latter two had predictive value; grit proved to be extraneous. The authors proposed that school success might demand more than simple, gritty passion and persistence. To excel across the board, teens must have the social skills to forge relationships with both their teachers and their peers, and their focus must be balanced across many different kinds of challenges.

Two more studies came out just this year. In one, Austrian researchers followed nearly 500 eighth-grade students and managed to explain about 40 percent of the differences among the students' grades on the basis of their relative intelligence and conscientiousness. Kids who measured higher in grit did do somewhat better in their classes, overall, but not in any unexpected way: Their conscientiousness appeared to be the overriding factor, with grit as one component. The second study looked at 156 college freshmen taking physics at a community college in Montreal and found that grit had little value at predicting their success.

The fact that grit fails to offer extra information in these settings-that it may be little more than a new and glossy version of an old idea-does not make it unimportant. Roberts, for one, is thrilled to have Duckworth on his side, arguing for the importance of character in fostering success. A 2009 meta-analysis of personality and academic performance found that, across 80 different studies, a student's conscientiousness can predict her academic outcomes, to an extent that's comparable to her intelligence and socio-economic background. Duckworth's evangelism for grit-as opposed to self-control, willpower, conscientiousness, and the rest-may be parochial, but at least it helps to drive this bigger message home.

But that's only half of Duckworth's argument. It's one thing to argue that grit matters more than talent or-more accurately-that your personality helps determine your success. Duckworth goes much further, asserting that you can change your personality and learn to "grow your grit."

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Thinkstock.

It takes Duckworth 80 pages to argue for the power of grit. It takes 200 more for her to explain that we can all be grittier. These latter sections serve what she calls her "purposeful, top-level goal" in life, the passion to which she applies her own reserve of grit: She wants to "use psychological science to help kids achieve and thrive." She hopes to prove to us that change is possible, and then she wants to tell us how to make it happen.

Grit aims to offer scientific tips on how to choose your own purposeful, top-level goal and how best to practice at it. It tells readers they should find a greater meaning in that goal and keep their spirits up when things start to go astray. The book gives advice on how to foster grit at home, at school, and in the workplace. But in the end, these rules of thumb-practice optimistic self-talk, find a mentor, go to therapy-have less to do with the study of psychology than with common sense and intuition. That's not Duckworth's fault: The problem is that there haven't been so many studies on "growing grit."

Always modest even as she makes her sweeping claims, Duckworth notes this lack of solid research. That doesn't stop her from dispensing helpful aphorisms, though. In the section on how to change your child's grit through parenting, Duckworth tells readers that she'd love to wait for scientific evidence, "but as a mother of two teenagers, I don't have time for all the data to come in. Like the parents asking me this question, I have to make decisions today."

In lieu of data, she provides a string of anecdotes-celebrity interviews, mostly-interspersed with authoritative equivocations. It's important for a child to overcome adversity, she concludes, but not too much adversity, which can damage him for life. Parents should be very demanding but also very warm and loving. Children should devote themselves to their activities but not be so single-minded that they fail to find their passions.

This doesn't sound like bad advice, but I'm not sure how well it serves Duckworth's top-level goal. While her book assumes we can choose to change our grit, the research that we do have seems to gesture at the opposite. Two recent twin studies (one of which is not yet published) looked at how grit and other personality traits predict academic success and how they relate to genetics. Like many other studies, they find that grit has little predictive value of its own (as compared with conscientiousness or other personality factors). But the analyses of twins reveal something else: While differences in grit can be explained in part by the students' genes, they cannot be explained by shared environmental factors. In other words, there's no evidence that the differences in how we're treating kids today-the standard range of parental styles and pedagogic modes-are doing much at all to grow (or shrink) their grit.

The church of grit has grown so rapidly in the past few years that even Duckworth has been calling for a pause.

It may even be the case that a child's personality is no more (or less) amenable to change than his basic cognitive skills. That is to say, we might do just as well (or poorly) at helping kids to thrive if we tried to help them grow their genius, not their grit.

Even better, we could focus on more specific skills that have a clear relationship to student grades. Why not try to foster better study habits in our kids or teach them tricks for improving their attendance? Those aren't big book tour-ready concepts, but they've been shown to have effects. If Duckworth's book can tell us anything at all, it's that we shouldn't lose our focus every time we come across a new idea in shiny packaging. It might be better if we persevered and stuck to things that work.

The self-help industry has little time for such considerations, though. The church of grit has grown so rapidly in the past few years, and with such incautious fervor, that even Duckworth has been calling for a pause.

In a March op-ed for the New York Times, she decried recent efforts to measure grit in public schools and to evaluate teachers on their success at making kids more gritty. "We're nowhere near ready- and perhaps never will be-to use feedback on character as a metric for judging the effectiveness of teachers and schools," Duckworth wrote. Still, the same essay cites her study showing that kids can be taught the gritty skills of setting goals and making plans and that this learning helps them to succeed. That research isn't quite a proof of principle: It looked at 77 fifth-graders at an urban public school and checked to see if the skills training would improve the students' report cards, classroom attendance, and conduct. The intervention seemed to work-but only for a single academic quarter. By the end of the year, the effects had gone away.

In the concluding section of her book, Duckworth arrives at her final big idea-what she calls "the culture of grit." Here she finds her paragon in Pete Carroll, Super Bowl-winning head coach of the Seattle Seahawks and author of a memoir called Win Forever. In 2013, she says, Carroll watched her TED talk and decided he had to get her on the phone. He wanted to know more about Duckworth's research, and he wanted to tell her that "building grit is exactly what the Seahawks culture is all about." Two years later, she went to the team's training facility and gave lectures on the power of grit to Seahawks players, coaches, and scouts. The visit was for research, too: Duckworth says she learned how the Seahawks remain courageous, and find lessons, even in the heartbreak of defeat. "Compete in everything you do," they say. "You're a Seahawk 24-7. Finish strong. Positive self-talk. Team first."

This Seahawks visit forms the book's anchoring anecdote and its final case study of success. But for me it raised a ticklish question: There may be power in having passion and perseverance, but might there be some menace, too? Could it be that football shows the darker side of grit and the ways that it goes wrong? The NFL sells itself on manly virtues: fighting through adversity, getting knocked down and getting up again, leading with the head, playing through your injuries, giving up your body for the game. That sounds a lot like grit-but is it good?

For win-forever guys like Pete Carroll, the benefits of grit seem to have no bounds. ("The best way to advance something is to live it out in everything you do," he says.) Even in a league that doesn't lack for excess in this regard, Carroll's team has often pushed the line: In 2013, he got called out for a pattern of his players taking performance-enhancing drugs;* in 2014, he was fined for having players hit one another at a practice, in violation of league safety rules; in 2015, he was criticized for fielding players with a history of domestic violence. Depending on your point of view, the Seahawks could be taken as a cautionary tale, of what happens when you pray with too much zeal at the altars of passion and perseverance.

It could be that having too much strength of purpose is worse than having not enough. At least that's what I'd like to think: I took Duckworth's test last week and learned to my dismay that I'm among the nation's least gritty citizens. The trait is scored from 1 to 5, and I came in at 2.9. That sounds like it could be right around the average, but in fact it's very low. According to Duckworth's book, my grittiness puts me in the 20 th percentile of American adults-more mercurial and weak-willed, less inclined to follow through, than four-fifths of the U.S. population.

That's OK with me. As a journalist, I thrive on flexibility, flitting around from one topic to another; I don't believe my job lends itself to grit. Mine is not the only field where inconstancy can be a virtue. If you want to win forever on the football field, or join the military, or write a book about a big idea, then it might be best to stay on target, compete in everything, and finish strong. But others find their path through mindful wavering and steer away from simple answers.

Update, May 9, 2016: This piece has been updated to include the names of the researchers who conducted a meta-analysis of the literature on grit. (Return.)

Correction, May 24, 2016: This article originally misstated that Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll got called out for a pattern of his players taking steroids. It was a pattern of players taking performance-enhancing drugs. (Return.)

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Is "Grit" the Key to Success or an Old Idea Dressed Up to Be the Latest Self-Help Sensation?

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A new book says you need passion and perseverance to achieve your goals in work and life. Is this a bold new idea or an old one dressed up to be the latest self-help sensation? In the summer of 2004, Angela Duckworth, then a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, went up to West Point to study 1,200 new cadets.

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Rose, M. (2015). Why teaching kids to have ‘grit’ isn’t always a good thing.
Summarize this article and make a connection to the Muenks research article.

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Mike Rose is a research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. This column appeared May 14 on the Washington Post's education blog, "The Answer Sheet."
One of the many frustrating things about education policy and practice in our country is the continual search for the magic bullet - and all the hype and trite lingo that bursts up around it. One such bullet is the latest incarnation of character education, particularly the enthrallment with "grit," a buzz word for perseverance and determination. Readers of this blog are familiar with my concerns and can read my earlier posts by clicking here, or go to a 2014 report on character and opportunity from the Brookings Institution in which I have a brief cautionary essay.

In a nutshell, I worry about the limited success of past attempts at character education and the danger in our pendulum-swing society that we will shift our attention from improving subject matter instruction. I also question the easy distinctions made between "cognitive" and "non-cognitive" skills. And I fear that we will sacrifice policies aimed at reducing poverty for interventions to change the way poor people see the world.

In this post, I would like to further explore these concerns - and a few new ones - by focusing on "grit," for it has so captured the fancy of our policy makers, administrators, and opinion-makers.

Grit's rise to glory is something to behold, a case study in the sociology of knowledge. If you go back ten or so years, you'll find University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth investigating the role of perseverance in achievement. This idea is not new in the study of personality and individual differences, but Duckworth was trying to more precisely define and isolate perseverance or persistence as an important personality trait via factor analysis, a standard statistical tool in personality psychology.

Through a series of studies of high-achieving populations (for example, Penn undergraduates, West Point cadets, Spelling Bee champions), Duckworth and her colleagues demonstrated that this perseverance quality might be distinct from other qualities (such as intelligence or self control) and seemed to account for between 1.4 to 6.3 percent of all that goes into the achievements of those studied. (Later studies would find several higher percentages.) These findings suggest that over 90 percent of her populations' achievements are accounted for by other personal, familial, environmental, and cultural factors, but, still, her findings are important and make a contribution to the academic study of personality - and support a commonsense belief that hard work over time pays off.

It is instructive to read Duckworth's foundational scholarly articles, something I suspect few staffers and no policymakers have done. The articles are revealing in their listing of qualifications and limitations: The original studies rely on self-report questionnaires, so can be subject to error and bias. The studies are correlational, so do not demonstrate causality. The exceptional qualities of some of the populations studied can create problems for factor analysis. Perseverance might have a downside to it. The construct of perseverance has been studied in some fashion for over a century.

But Duckworth and her colleagues did something that in retrospect was a brilliant marketing strategy, a master stroke of branding - or re-branding. Rather than calling their construct "perseverance" or "persistence," they chose to call it "grit." Can you think of a name that has more resonance in American culture? The fighter who is all heart. The hardscrabble survivor. True Grit. The Little Train That Could.

Grit exploded. New York Times commentators, best-selling journalists, the producers of "This American Life," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, educational policymakers and administrators all saw the development of grit as a way to improve American education and, more pointedly, to improve the achievement of poor children who, everyone seemed to assume, lacked grit.

I'll get to that last part about poor kids in a moment, but first I want to ask some questions few policymakers are asking. What is an education suitable for a democracy? What kind of people are we trying to develop? What is our philosophy of education? With these questions in mind, let's consider some items taken from the two instruments Duckworth and colleagues have used in their studies. The items are listed under grit's two subscales, the factors that comprise grit:
Consistency of Interests Subscale:
*New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.
*I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.
*I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.
Perseverance of Effort Subscale:
*Setbacks don't discourage me.
*I finish whatever I begin.
*I have achieved a goal that took years of work.
These items are answered on a five-point scale:
*Very much like me
*Mostly like me
*Somewhat like me
*Not much like me
*Not like me at all

Let me repeat here what I've written in every other commentary on grit. Of course, perseverance is an important characteristic. I cherish it in my friends and my students.

But at certain ages and certain times in our lives, exploration and testing new waters can also contribute to one's development and achievement. Knowing when something is not working is important as well. Perseverance and determination as represented in the grit questionnaires could suggest a lack of flexibility, tunnel vision, an inability to learn from mistakes.

Again, my point is not to dismiss perseverance but to suggest that perseverance, or grit, or any quality works in tandem with other qualities in the well-functioning and ethical person. By focusing so heavily on grit, character education in some settings has been virtually reduced to a single quality, and probably not the best quality in the content of character. The items in the grit instruments could describe the brilliant surgeon who is a distant and absent parent, or, for that fact, the smart, ambitious, amoral people who triggered the Great Recession. (Macbeth with his "vaulting ambition" would score quite high on grit.) Education in America has to be about more than producing driven super-achievers. For that fact, a discussion of what we mean by "achievement" is long overdue.

But, of course, a good deal of the discussion of grit doesn't really involve all students. Regardless of disclaimers, the primary audience for our era's character education is poor kids. As I and a host of others have written, a focus on individual characteristics of low-income children can take our attention away from the structural inequalities they face. Some proponents of character education have pretty much said that an infusion of grit will achieve what social and economic interventions cannot.

Can I make a recommendation? Along with the grit survey, let us give another survey and see what the relationship is between the scores. I'm not sure what to call this new survey, but it would provide a measure of adversity, of impediments to persistence, concentration, and the like. It, too, would use a five-point response scale: "very much like me" to "not much like me." Its items would include:

I always have bus fare to get to school.

I hear my parents talking about not having enough money for the rent.

Whenever I get sick, I am able to go to a doctor.

We always have enough food in our home.

I worry about getting to school safely.

There are times when I have to stay home to care for younger brothers or sisters.

My school has honors and Advanced Placement classes.

I have at least one teacher who cares about me.

My guess is that higher impediment scores would be linked to lower scores on the grit survey. I realize that what grit advocates want is to help young people better cope with such hardship. Anyone who has worked seriously with kids in tough circumstances spends a lot of time providing support and advice, and if grit interventions can provide an additional resource, great. But if as a society we are not also working to improve the educational and economic realities these young people face, then we are engaging in a cruel hoax, building aspiration and determination for a world that will not fulfill either.

The foundational grit research primarily involved populations of elite high achievers-Ivy League students, West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee contestants - and people responding to a Positive Psychology website based at the University of Pennsylvania. It is from the latter population that the researchers got a wider range of ages and data on employment history.

I was not able to find socioeconomic information for these populations, but given what we know generally about Ivy League undergraduates, West Point cadets, etc., I think it is a safe guess that most come from stable economic backgrounds. (In one later study, Duckworth and colleagues drew on 7-11 grade students at a "socioeconomically and ethnically diverse magnet public school" where 18 percent of the students were low-income - that's some economic diversity, but not a school with concentrated disadvantage.)

It is also safe to assume that the majority of the people who are interested in Positive Psychology and self-select to respond to an on-line questionnaire have middle-class employment histories with companies or in professions that have pathways and mechanisms for advancement. So the construct of grit and the instruments to measure it are largely based on populations that more likely than not are able to pursue their interests and goals along a landscape of resources and opportunity. This does not detract from the effort they expend or from their determination, but it does suggest that their grit is deployed in a world quite different from the world poor people inhabit.

It is hard to finish what you begin when food and housing are unstable, or when you have three or four teachers in a given year, or when there are few people around who are able to guide and direct you. It is equally hard to pursue a career with consistency when the jobs available to you are low-wage, short-term and vulnerable, and have few if any benefits or protections. This certainly doesn't mean that people who are poor lack determination and resolve. Some of the poor people I knew growing up or work with today possess off-the-charts determination to survive, put food on the table, care for their kids. But they wouldn't necessarily score high on the grit scale.

Personality psychology by its disciplinary norms concentrates on the individual, but individual traits and qualities, regardless of how they originate and develop, manifest themselves in social and institutional contexts. Are we educators and policy makers creating classrooms that are challenging and engaging enough to invite perseverance? Are we creating opportunity for further educational or occupational programs that enable consistency of effort? Are we gritty enough to keep working toward these goals without distraction over the long haul?

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UCLA faculty voice: Why teaching kids to have 'grit' isn't always a good thing

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Mike Rose is a research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. This column appeared May 14 on the Washington Post's education blog, "The Answer Sheet." One of the many frustrating things about education policy and practice in our country is the continual search for the magic bullet - and all the hype and trite lingo that bursts up around it.

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To be completed at the end of class today..

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-Duckworth held belief that every one of her students could learn the math material she was teaching as long as they tried long and hard enough.
She found:
--Greatest predictor of success is grit.
-Grittier kids are more likely to graduate.
-Don't know much about how to build grit.
- best answer was to build a growth mindset.
-Grit isn't related to talent.