Grit and Its Critics

Grit — passion and perseverance for long-term goals — became an educational celebrity after Angela Duckworth’s research suggested it predicted success beyond talent. Like most celebrities, it has since faced sharper scrutiny. Both the idea and its critics deserve a fair hearing, because the practical stakes for able learners are real.

The original claim

Duckworth and colleagues (2007) found that grit scores predicted outcomes in demanding settings — West Point retention, spelling bee progression, university grades — over and above measured intelligence. The insight resonated in talent development because ability without sustained engagement reliably underdelivers: Bloom’s 1985 study of world-class performers found persistence through the long, unglamorous middle years to be universal in their histories.

What the critics found

Credé, Tynan and Harms (2017) meta-analysed hundreds of grit studies and deflated the balloon considerably: grit correlates with performance far more weakly than early claims implied, overlaps heavily with the long-established trait of conscientiousness, and its “passion” component adds little predictive power. Interventions to teach grit as a trait have little evidence behind them. In short: the construct is neither novel nor magic.

The useful residue

Strip the branding and something practical remains. Sustained engagement with a domain is genuinely necessary for high achievement — but it is better understood as a property of the situation as much as the child: interest that has been allowed to deepen (Hidi and Renninger’s four phases), goals the learner owns, visible progress, and support through difficulty. A school cannot install “grit” by exhortation, but it can build the conditions under which persistence is the natural response — meaningful focus, the right challenge, and review points that make growth visible.

What we take from the debate

We treat perseverance as an outcome to engineer for, not a trait to grade children on. When a capable learner disengages, the developmental question is not “does this child lack grit?” but “what in the provision stopped deserving their persistence?” That question has actionable answers; the other one mostly produces labels.

See how engagement is built into the cycle on the Talent Framework page.

References

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101.
Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511.
Bloom, B. S. (Ed.) (1985). Developing Talent in Young People. New York: Ballantine Books.