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

Draft
We must also consider that this is a rich, but nascent field. In fact, the term “grit” made it into the
research literature as a viable topic of study in education only as recently as 2007 (i.e.,
Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). The NRC report on 21st-century skills points
out that there has been extensive research and advances in understanding around cognitive
competencies, but the research on the intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies is limited,
and primarily correlational in nature. This limitation is consistent with the historical emphasis on
intellectual factors over noncognitive factors in research, practice, and policy. Core
recommendations of the NRC report are that foundations and federal agencies should support
research programs to develop theory, assessment, and interventions that fill critical gaps (NRC,
2012).
With the wealth of progress and information distributed broadly across communities, it is an
important time to step back, take stock, and prepare to move forward. There is a strong need to
look across the variety of areas of work to distill the major themes; evaluate the state of the
field’s empirical understandings; find out what is actionable in terms of best practices,
technology, measurement, and the design of learning environments; and uncover important gaps
in practice, research, and policy. To construct this report, the methods were designed to allow us
to examine the rich theory and evidence that does exist, and draw out specific conclusions that
we are and are not in a position to make at this point, along with recommendations for moving
forward.
Research Questions and Research Design
This brief was designed to integrate answers to driving research questions into a useful
framework with accompanying conclusions and recommendations. The remaining chapters will
focus on the following questions:
1. What are grit, tenacity, and perseverance? What are the key components of these
competencies, what psychological and contextual factors support and promote them?
2. How are these factors measured currently? How can they be measured in the future? How
can technology provide new tools and strategies?
3. How can formal and informal learning environments be designed to promote these factors for
a wide variety of students? How can digital learning environments be leveraged? What are
illustrative case examples?
4. What are key conclusions and recommendations for practice, research, and policy?
We used two complementary research approaches. The first was a systematic exploration of the
corpus of existing research and narrative review. Following research synthesis methods (e.g.,
Cooper, 1989; Cook et al., 1994; Lipsey & Wilson, 2001), we began with a systematic search for
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