2. Who Is Successful And Why?
Duckworth studied children and adults in challenging environments, including West Point military
cadets, national spelling bee contestants, and top corporate salesmen. In each study, she and her
research team asked the same question: “Who is successful here and why?
Talent or Effort –
Common character - Grit is the quality that allows an individual to work hard and maintain focus—not
just for weeks or months, but for years.
Measuring grit- Grit Scale
A self-reported questionnaire – To evaluate focused effort and interest over time with questions such
as, “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.”
Respondents answer on a scale of one to five, with one being “Not at all like me,” and five being
“Very much like me.”
3. Steps To Develop Grit
Step 1- Develop a fascination- Keep questions alive
Step 2-Daily Improvement- Compete with yourself
Step 3-Greater Purpose- Pleasure Vs Purpose
Step 4-Growth Mindset
4. IS GRIT THE ONLY CHARACTERISTIC YOU SHOULD FOCUS
ON?
Research published since Duckworth’s TED
Talk show that a number of factors
influence student learning.
Details as seemingly small as the
temperature or layout of a room can also
impact student motivation and perseverance.
Since her 2013 TED Talk, Duckworth
herself has revisited the role of grit in
student success and acknowledged that
“when we are talking about what kids need
to grow up and live lives that are happy and
healthy and good for other people, it’s a
long list of things. Grit is on that list, but it
is not the only thing on the list.”
5. Critiques Of Grit
Marcus Crede.et al.- Much Ado about Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit
Literature- analyzes 88 separate studies by Duckworth and others.
"My overall assessment is that grit is far less important than has commonly been
assumed and claimed”. “And it doesn't tell us anything that we don't already know.“
Here are the key claims in Crede's paper:
1. Effect sizes in one of Duckworth's major papers on grit were described incorrectly to
sound misleadingly large.
2. The impact of grit is exaggerated, especially when looking at broader populations of
people — not just the high achievers in Duckworth's initial studies.
3. Grit is nearly identical to conscientiousness, which has been known to psychologists for
decades as a major dimension of personality. It is not something that's necessarily open
to change, especially in adults, whereas Duckworth in her writings suggests that grit is.
6. Angela’s Response To Critique
On Point No. 1, Duckworth admits to the charge of badly describing the size of her outcomes.
On Point No. 2, Crede's paper calls the relationship between grit and academic success "only
modest.” His analysis found an overall correlation of 0.18, looking at papers by Duckworth and others.
SATs had much higher correlation of .50 where as Duckworth’s was only 0.20. She says her findings of
the independent impact of grit are what personality psychologists would put in the "small-to-medium"
range.
On Point No. 3, He's challenging the uniqueness of grit, and therefore its usefulness as an object of
research. Duckworth said in her response to Crede's paper that she would prefer to think of grit as "a
member of the conscientiousness family," but one with independent predictive powers.
Duckworth says she never tried to oversell her findings, and has always tried to be "clear and honest."
"I aspire to be a scientist who remains open to criticism because I can't possibly be 100% right about
everything!" she told NPR Ed.
She said she's currently thinking about revising her "grit scale," her basic experimental tool, specifically
the questions about passion.
7. Mike Rose: Why Teaching “Grit” Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing
“Perseverance is an important characteristic. 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.”
Looks into impediments score/adversity-Says that higher impediments could be linked to lower grit
Rose notes that the people Angela Duckworth studied were highly successful.
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.
Hence there could be a strong biasness of the data.
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.
This certainly doesn’t mean that people who are poor lack determination and resolve.
8. After reflecting on some of the backlash she received after her TED Talk, Duckworth has
clarified that a “no excuses” or shame-based approach to grit isn’t the way to go. “It is a
natural human instinct to shy away from mistake-making, from confusion, from challenge,”
Duckworth told EdSurge. “And it is therefore the responsibility of the classroom teacher or
school or community to make sure that kids understand that when they don’t want to do
something that’s hard, when they don’t want to do something that will maybe not work out,
and when they don’t want to quit things, that the first and most important thing is start from
understanding and accepting that that is part of the struggle.
