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

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Methodological tradeoffs. Using classroom observation protocols and reports from teachers or
other professionals addresses concerns regarding bias in self-report, and informant reports can be
particularly helpful for ascertaining intrapersonal competencies in young children. If observers
are able to consistently judge behaviors and interactions, observation protocols can be valuable
for evaluating the characteristics of exchanges among students and teachers, how students
interact with tools, student affect, or whether they are applying learning strategies or sticking
with a task. Collecting and analyzing enough observation data to draw generalizable conclusions
is resource intensive as systematic analyses of observation data may require video recording,
training of observers to evaluate behaviors and interactions consistently, and time to complete
the observations and coding. Observational approaches also can present challenges in capturing
information about an individual’s mindset, which is less directly observable, and affect, which
can be difficult to judge.
School Records
Methods. Another source of data about students’ perseverance is school records about grades,
standardized test scores, attendance, dropping-out, discipline problems, social services used, and
so on. The Expanding Evidence report points to important trends in the availability and
application of technology-supported institutional-level data for supporting at-risk students (U.S.
Department of Education Office of Educational Technology, 2013). Data at the institutional level
is becoming increasingly streamlined and cross-referenced, improving the capacity to link
student data within and across systems.
Some example measures. One example is the Youth Data Archive (YDA) at the Gardner Center
at Stanford University, which links data across systems—school, social services, foster care,
youth development programming, juvenile justice—to provide actionable integrated student
profiles to educators. Another example is the use of interest-driven badging systems, for
example, Mozilla Open Badges (http://www.openbadges.org), to recognize in and out of school
learning and accomplishments.
Methodological tradeoffs. Data from school records provides new possibilities for rich
longitudinal analyses of educational impacts, as well as for informing early warning systems that
can be used to identify students who are not managing to persevere in the face of all of the
challenges of schooling. These records, however, are only broad indicators of perseverance and
do not tell the richer story of an individual’s characteristics or how an individual’s interactions
with features of the learning environment contribute to these outcomes.
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