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

Draft
Executive Summary
How can we best prepare children and adolescents to thrive in the 21st century—an era of
achievement gaps that must be closed for the benefit of everyone in society, rapidly evolving
technology, demanding and collaborative STEM knowledge work, changing workforce needs,
and economic volatility? The test score accountability movement and conventional educational
approaches tend to focus on intellectual aspects of success, such as content knowledge. However,
this is not sufficient. If students are to achieve their full potential, they must have opportunities to
engage and develop a much richer set of skills. There is a growing movement to explore the
potential of the “noncognitive” factors—attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes, and
intrapersonal resources, independent of intellectual ability—that high-achieving individuals draw
upon to accomplish success.
In this brief, we take a close look at a core set of noncognitive factors—grit, tenacity, and
perseverance. These factors are essential to an individual’s capacity to strive for and succeed at
long-term and higher-order goals, and to persist in the face of the array of challenges and
obstacles encountered throughout schooling and life. Importantly, we are deliberate not to treat
these factors as residing only within the student—it is the responsibility of the educational
community to design learning environments that promote these factors so that students are
prepared to meet 21st-century challenges.
What will it take to shift educational priorities to promote not only content knowledge, but also
grit, tenacity, and perseverance? This is an important and exciting time to stop, take stock, and
prepare to move forward. New and emerging trends in research, policy, programs, and
technology are providing unprecedented opportunities. A growing corpus of research evidence
suggests that these factors can be just as important as intellectual abilities for success, and new
research programs are exploring ways to promote these factors. Several private foundations have
recently initiated programs to push the frontiers of theory, measurement, and practice around
these and related factors, particularly for at-risk and vulnerable students. In national policy, there
is increasing attention on 21st-century competencies (which encompass a range of noncognitive
factors, including grit), and persistence is now part of the Common Core State Standards for
Mathematics. The popular media also reports on interest in these factors. While the United States
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