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

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• Developing content-specific metacognitive skills. Students also need to develop contentspecific
metacognitive skills for planning and monitoring to deal with disciplinary-specific
challenges. Snipes and colleagues discuss two such interventions. Thinkertools Inquiry
Curriculum (http://thinkertools.org/) helps students in grades 7 to 9 learn to monitor and
reflect on their progress as they conduct inquiry science projects (White & Frederiksen,
2001). Reading Apprenticeship (http://www.wested.org/cs/ra/print/docs/ra/home.htm) helps
students learn metacognitive skills for reading and analyzing texts in specific disciplines,
through conversations with teachers about their own mental processes, strategies, knowledge
resources, motivations, and affective responses to texts. Greenleaf et al. (2011) showed that
Reading Apprenticeship significantly impacted high school biology students’ achievement on
tests in English language arts, reading comprehension, and biology.
These mindset and strategy interventions point to powerful new opportunities to help students
develop the psychological resources to persevere in the face of a variety of types of challenges
and setbacks. These interventions target a range of age levels, from middle school through
college. Many target underserved student populations or other types of struggling students. The
callout box on the next page describes additional programs that support the development of
protective factors for children and adults that support resilience in the face of life challenges.
These approaches combine attention to mindsets and strategies with other social-emotional
competencies.
Research is still necessary to develop and match particular types of interventions to specific
needs, to help educators integrate these interventions into their practice, and to examine impacts
at scale in a variety of settings and across age levels.
3. Alternative School Models and School-Level Reform Approaches
Another set of approaches promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance through alternative school
models or reform efforts at the school level. Programs target schools at all levels of the
socioeconomic spectrum, in public charter schools, traditional public schools, and private
schools. Depending on the approach, these noncognitive factors may be addressed directly and
explicitly, or more implicitly integrated in a comprehensive educational model.
What each of these approaches has in common is a mission to change in fundamental ways how
schools prepare a wide diversity of students to build deep understanding and critical skills for the
21st century. For example, charter school networks, like KIPP, Envision, and Mastery, were
founded between 1994 and 2001 with specific missions to raise achievement for disadvantaged
student populations. Despite their positive mission and clear evidence of shrinking the K-12
achievement gap, leaders discovered that achievement gains alone were not leading to higher
college graduation rates. Leaders were also learning, anecdotally, that the students who were able
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