Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance - U.S. Department of ...

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conceptual complexity, lack of tactical knowledge about how to study, more dominant
distractions, lack of motivation, and boredom.
• A practical consideration for most educational settings is that teachers must cover a large
number of content standards, leaving little appetite for the addition of learning objectives for
seemingly new and different types of competencies beyond their disciplinary content.
• The mindsets and learning strategies in different disciplines will be deeply intertwined with
the practices of each discipline. For example, perseverance in a challenging inquiry science
project may require extensive planning and self-monitoring grounded in the practices such as
designing and conducting investigations and constructing models, whereas perseverance to
solve a difficult math problem may require having a toolkit of cognitive mathematical
strategies as potential entry points into the problem and a growth mindset.
• Hooks to foster perseverance through interest, passion, and connections to students’ everyday
lives can differ significantly across disciplines.
When these competencies are effectively integrated in the practice of learning disciplinary
content and concepts, there is the potential for learning to be more effective and engaging for
students.
Conclusion 9: It is important for students to develop grit, tenacity, and perseverance within
disciplinary contexts, for example, as part of how they become proficient in mathematics,
language arts, science, music, or sports. Within academic and nonacademic disciplines, there is
a need to develop ways to integrate best practices for promoting these factors.
Recommendation 9: Researchers should investigate how to integrate fundamentally with
discipline-specific pedagogy, curriculum, and teaching practices the supports to promote grit,
tenacity, and perseverance, and key psychological resources (mindsets, learning strategies,
and effortful control).
Need to Push the Edge of Technology
Another major theme has been around the roles that new and emerging technologies can play in
promoting grit. These are providing opportunities with the potential to advance education far
beyond what has been possible before—technologies are increasing the sophistication of
assessment and adaptation to individual learning needs, enabling individuals to utilize for their
own purposes an unprecedented wealth of online resources and providing access to worldwide
interpersonal networking. These affordances provide new ways to promote agency and
perseverance for individuals—particularly those traditionally with limited access to resources—
toward goals that have previously been unattainable.
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