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

Draft
One important distinction that has implications for measurement is whether perseverance is
conceptualized as a disposition or a set of processes. If conceptualized as a disposition, 1
measurement may target perseverance as a general or enduring tendency to persevere.
Disposition measures can help researchers understand how these tendencies relate to academic
variables, and they can provide helpful information to students, teachers, and parents about
students’ tendencies and preferences. If perseverance is conceptualized as a set of processes,
measurement may focus on sequences of behaviors, emotions, physiological reactions, and/or
thoughts that unfold over time during learning, extracting indicators of persistence and giving up.
New technologies using educational data mining and “affective computing” (the study and
development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate aspects
of human affect) are beginning to focus on “micro-level” moment-by-moment data within digital
and blended-learning environments to provide feedback to adapt learning tasks to personalized
needs. Measurement may also target the psychological resources that contribute to and interact
with perseverance: academic mindsets, effortful control, and strategies and tactics.
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 resourceintensive—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 seamlessly
1
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.
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