Dear Commons Community,

Following on the heels of Paul Tough’ s book, How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character, the U.S.  Department of Education has issued a draft report examining these qualities in terms of student success.  The report is ambitious in trying to deal with this very difficult and murky topic.  Here is an excerpt from the 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…

While this domain of noncognitive factors is rich and vibrant, it is also quite nascent. Research and practice traditions in education, psychology, economics, engineering, and other fields  provide a wealth of knowledge about these factors. At the same time, there are many unanswered questions, and it can be challenging to navigate this landscape of ideas.

The purpose of this brief is to distill the critical themes, questions, conclusions, and recommendations around theory, measurement, and the design of learning environments, with an eye toward identifying  potential  new roles for technology.  This brief explores the possibility that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be malleable and teachable, and discusses the potential of these factors to significantly increase success for all students.”

Without a doubt, this is an important area of investigation for educators and worth one’s time to review.

Tony