At a recent faculty meeting the issue of “grit” was raised in reference to a policy introduced at the beginning of the academic year requiring homework due dates and test dates to be posted to our schoolwide learning management system. A significant portion of the teaching faculty expressed concerns that posting such information to the course websites decreased student grit.
Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, writing for Brookings reviewed the relevant literature and drew the following conclusions in response to what he identified as questions common in schools around the topic of grit.
Is grit a malleable characteristic of students that schools can be held accountable for influencing? No. The twin study finds that the heritability of the perseverance component of grit is 37 percent. In other words, identical twins are substantially more similar on grit than fraternal twins. Importantly for the school malleability issue, the contribution of the shared environment to grit is essentially zero. In other words, children who are raised in the same family and attend the same schools are no more similar on grit than children who do not share their family and school environments (once the contribution of shared genes is removed). As I suggested in my previous report, it seems unreasonable to hold schools accountable for influencing something over which evidence suggests neither the family environment nor schools has any meaningful influence. [emphasis mine]
The entire summary of Whitehurst’s research is worth reading; the above is simply the most relevant to our year-end faculty meeting.