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

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implications for practices around setting up learning environments, designing curriculum,
and providing teacher professional development.
• A broad range of programs across settings have begun to implement and test models to
teach and/or promote these factors for a wide variety students across age levels. In our
interviews and literature review to prepare this brief, we encountered many programs and
approaches already under development or in progress to teach and/or promote a range of
aspects of grit, tenacity, or perseverance for students across the age span from preschool to
postsecondary education. Settings include school readiness programs, brief interventions in
schools, alternative school models and school-level reform approaches, informal learning
programs, and digital learning environments, online resources, and tools for teachers. Many
of these programs have data suggesting impacts on both perseverance and achievement.
• Private foundations have initiated programs intended to push the frontiers of theory,
measurement, and practice around these factors. In the last couple of years, for example,
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Raikes Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the
Stupski Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Moore Foundation, and the MacArthur
Foundation have all initiated programs that have made significant advances in the field.
Some examples follow:
− Foundations funded comprehensive research literature reviews on academic tenacity
(Dweck, Walton, & Cohen, 2011), the role of noncognitive factors in shaping school
performance (Farrington et al., 2012), and the landscape of student academic mindset
interventions (Snipes, Fancsali, & Stoker, 2012).
− The Gates Foundation, in the Engagement Pedometer initiative, has engaged a network of
experts in measurement to create a new generation of measurement approaches building
on new technologies (Dieterle & Vasudeva, 2012).
− The Raikes Foundation, in the Middle Shift initiative, has been working with a network
of researchers and practitioners to increase the capacity to foster “agency”—persistent
behavior in alignment with the mindsets and learning strategies necessary for success in
college, career, and life—for the nation’s at-risk 10- to14-year-olds. They are leveraging
the work of several organizations that have already begun building and implementing
models in formal and informal school settings.
− The Moore Foundation sponsors the Science Activation Lab, which is conducting
research to understand the most important contributing factors for persistence in
participation in science and how to leverage these in the design of learning environments.
− The MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media & Learning Program is investigating how to
leverage new digital and social media to provide students with material resources and
human capital that make it possible to achieve goals that have previously been
unattainable by many students.
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