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

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• Timescale. Goals can be relatively short-term, such as solving a difficult math problem;
medium-term, such as studying for a test or completing a complicated inquiry-science
project; or long-term, such as graduating from high school and being ready for college.
• Complexity. Independent of timescale, goals can have lesser or greater complexity.
Becoming the National Spelling Bee champion and completing all of the educational
milestones to become a STEM professional are both lofty long-term goals; however, the
latter will likely require a more complex sequence of actions over time.
• Academic content domain or setting. If the goals are content-focused, they can differ
depending on whether they are within math, science, language arts, an extracurricular
activity, or some other content domain. For example, achieving deep understanding of the
concepts of calculus requires different actions and supports than learning to shape the
rhetoric of essays.
• Nature of the reward and students’ valuing of attaining the goal. Goals can be motivated
by intrinsic interests, extrinsic pressures for performance, and/or fear of failure. The same
goal can be valued quite differently depending on the student. For example, for many
students, getting into college is of extremely high value; it is less so for many students.
While there is a vast range of types of goals that students can take on, across many different
research literatures, a common theme is that students are more likely to persevere in a productive
manner when, to the student, the goals are worthy of perseverance.
Optimal challenge. One important principle is that students find goals “worthy” of pursuit when
they are “optimally challenging”—they require some perseverance to succeed, but not so much
so that they seem overwhelming or impossible. Many of the education experts we interviewed, as
well as psychologists, game designers, sports experts, and others who deal with pushing people
to do their best, discuss an optimal zone in which students can be motivated to engage in
challenges that facilitate growth, with neither boredom nor anxiety. Csikszentmihalyi, in his
1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, explores optimal challenge, starting
with the basic premise dating back to Aristotle that, more than anything else, people are driven to
seek happiness. Based on a variety of empirical case studies, field studies, laboratory
experiments, and historical analyses, he lays out a theory of “flow,” the enjoyable and singleminded
state of involvement with a task such that nothing else matters. Flow is a state that is so
enjoyable that people will seek out and persist at tasks that evoke it for the sheer sake of doing it.
Across a wide range of settings, he found some basic characteristics of tasks that tend to evoke
flow. Exhibit 5 illustrates a set of principles for understanding such tasks. On the x-axis is the
level of an individual’s skills, and on the y-axis is the degree of challenge of an activity. When
the individual has skills that exceed the challenge of the activity (i.e., shown in the lower right
hand quadrant), she or he would be bored. When the activity is challenging in a way that exceeds
the individual’s skills (i.e., shown in the upper left hand quadrant), he or she would experience
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