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

Draft
Conclusions and Recommendations for Research
Conclusion 7: Across communities of practice and research traditions, inconsistency in
conceptual terminology is a barrier to collaboration and progress.
Recommendation 7: Researchers should seek to (1) tease apart conceptual distinctions that
are critical to practice and (2) construct and work within consolidated frameworks that unify
concepts and findings. Collaborative partnerships, working groups, professional conferences,
and peer-reviewed publications should be geared to identify and work with unifying themes and
common definitions.
Conclusion 8: There is a need to develop empirically based models of pathways for developing
grit, tenacity, and perseverance over time, in different contexts, and for different types of goals
and challenges. Such work would inform the development of learning trajectories and selecting
age-appropriate and context-appropriate interventions.
Recommendation 8: Researchers should conduct (1) longitudinal studies to develop coherent
models of developmental pathways in different kinds of contexts, (2) systematic research
examining the same individuals striving to accomplish goals in different contexts, and
(3) systematic research about the different types of supports necessary for different kinds of
goals and challenges.
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).
Conclusion 10: There are important opportunities to leverage new and emerging advances in
technology (e.g., educational data mining, affective computing, online resources, tools for
teachers) to develop unprecedented approaches for a wide range of students.
Recommendation 10: Researchers should work closely with technology developers to continue
to explore how to integrate best practices into new and emerging digital learning environments
that are well positioned to promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance, and key psychological
resources (mindsets, learning strategies, and effortful control) for a range of purposes.
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