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

Draft
• Digital learning environments that promote the development of effortful control. As
discussed above, there are a variety of computerized training tools in which children play
computer games that progressively increase demand on functions such as working memory
and impulse control. One example discussed above is CogMed (http://www.cogmed.com/),
which has been demonstrated to be successful for young children.
New and emerging technologies provide many different types of resources to support students’
perseverance. While several of these programs have demonstrated impacts on learning, there is
still much work to be done to more fully engage the potential of technology.
Moving Forward
In this chapter, we explored roughly 50 approaches practitioners and researchers are developing
and testing ways to promote and/or teach grit, tenacity, and perseverance—through structuring
contextual factors, bolstering psychological resources, or some combination of both. We found
programs in both formal and informal learning environments, some of which had integral
technology components. Some approaches integrated teacher professional development elements
as well. Interventions spanned the age range. Effortful control and executive function
interventions were geared primarily for preschool and early elementary school. Mindsets and
learning strategies interventions were geared toward older students from middle school through
postsecondary school. Some of the programs we investigated were designed to promote
noncognitive factors themselves, and some programs targeted noncognitive factors embedded in
the learning of STEM content. Interventions targeted a range of student populations. Many were
intended for underserved students of various types, while many were implemented with more
mainstream student populations.
There are substantial data available about impacts of these programs. We can divide these
programs into three categories. The first category of programs has research or evaluation data
that shows impacts with respect specifically to noncognitive factors and, in most cases, academic
achievement. These programs include most of the school readiness programs, academic mindset
interventions, learning strategy interventions, and many of the digital learning environments. In
research on these approaches, researchers’ experimental manipulations are the active
noncognitive ingredients, so it is possible to make inferences about causality. Most of the
alternative school models and some of the digital learning environments only had achievement
data available. While this data is important and compelling, these interventions are complex, and
it is not possible to isolate the potential impacts of the noncognitive factors themselves. For the
rest of the interventions, particularly the out of school programs, approaches are relatively new
and/or have limited funding, and provide only anecdotal evidence of success. While the findings
in this chapter do not establish grit, tenacity, and perseverance as transferable competencies,
taken as a whole, the findings provide a source of optimism about what is possible.
73