Is ‘grit’ overrated in explaining student success?
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I use quotes because it does raise the question of who is really the smart one there.
In this case, I do mean that the smart kid was the one who immediately showed an understanding of the material and could demonstrate proficiency sometimes beyond the course material... but was too lazy to actually hand in his work.
The other kid needed massive amounts of extra attention, came in every day at lunch to see if he could just put a bit more time in, handed in the work six times with improvements each time... he crushed it.
If anything, `grit` would be underrated in measuring student success if we pegged it at 100% of the variance.
That said, "student success" is only one measure and is, in a number of ways, wildly artificial.
There was an adage to the effect of "you only learn what you pay attention to", but in this case we might also say "you're only graded on what you do"
If student success is measured in grades, and you're only graded on what you do, then doing work (aka: grit) is the only thing that matters.
Fortunately I still have a work ethic when it makes sense to do work, but fifteen years after high school my lack of study skills is hampering attempts to further my education.
There was likely ~25 kids in the class, and the teacher had no way of knowing that you cheated on the tests or got really lucky. The HW acted as a bulwark against the luck and cheating hypotheses that a teacher should entertain for each of the ~25 students in one of their ~6 classes (~150 students total). So what if you are a just that smart as a teenager? We all knew we were smarter than everyone at that age too. You have to prove that to the teacher in terms of consistent work at a consistent level (Sorta, things happen, Granpas die, parents get in accidents, etc. and teachers know that). 1 person out of ~150 showing up and acing a test tells a teacher nothing. And for the pay levels they get these days, the teachers are there because they want to be.
For starters, notice that some kids are doing whole lesson's worth of material in the first 15 minutes and figure out that they have no reason to be at this lesson.
The hard question, to which I don't claim to know a silver bullet answer, is where should they be instead. Recognizing who is wasting their time at school isn't that difficult if you spend several hours per week with those kids.
It's part of their job.
As a teacher in the united kingdom, I do not actually do the marking myself. I gather and estimate the evidence of their grades, but then submit their work to a central exam board.
If a student will not produce the work, they can't get the grade.
My personal evidence that they are smart is actually 100% irrelevant in the context of non-progressive school systems. (virtually anything with standardized testing, league tables, school rankings, etc..)
"it's part of my job" is a wonderful platitude and is really easy to spout while waving your hands in the air to denote "details happen"
but the realities are that the second-smartest kids typically don't do the work and can't get the grades no matter how much coaxing, cajoling and whatnot I try.
Fact is, in a single room with 30 kids, and an annual working student body of ~300 - it's part of the student's job to do the work.
And if we all face facts here, the smart student who squanders their own abilities will actually be fine at the end of the day.
One day they'll decide they want to work, will catch up with the world and land in a distinctly average position like they deserve.
The hardest job and kid who deserves the most attention is the kid from a broken home, who might not get fed every day, whose role models are possibly drug abusing or alcoholic etc... If we invest our effort there we might be able to lift poverty into middle class.
Middle class to distinctly average is nothing we really have to worry about.
Would I have been more successful at university and after graduating if I had more "grit?" I think so. But I didn't need it, so I didn't have it.
What can be done to prevent this? The obvious theoretical answer is to reduce class sizes, so that students can do coursework with other students who learn at a similar rate. If only America would adequately fund education...
This would EMPHATICALLY not be vouchers. The funds would only be available to churches that do not currently run a private school.
Get more religious nut jobs out of my child's secular public schools. Reduce class size. Create more teaching jobs. Everyone's happy.
my experience as a student at top 5 ugrad was similar: kids with top hs grades and work ethic destroyed the truly brilliant students (with top test scores) in terms of academic performance.
I will ace almost any actual project. I've signed up for a Rover Challenge team and learned so much more already...
I constantly regret that my knowledge is rather rickety/shallow But at the same time it's rather wide-encompassing
The point is, "academic achievement" is rather moot, IMO. You pick up tools, a soldering iron and suddenly learn there is much more to it
If the smartest kid "failed" because he "didn't hand in his work"... this is a plain and unambiguous confession that your job wasn't to educate, but to make the poodles jump through hoops.
What hard work?
They need me to think. Clearly, intensely, brilliantly at times.
Someone who 'shows up and does the work" will never be able to do what I do, because "showing up and doing the work" is the antithesis of thinking clearly and intensely. It's what unthinking people do.
Here on Hacker News, I suspect most are more like me, and less like those who "show up and do the work". However, there are some vestigial counter-productive work ethics from the early 20th century that haven't completely withered. Or maybe it's just a metaphor that we can't let go of, one that feels important even though whatever it once described is now gone.
Thinking is an important part of the job for most people on HN, as you rightly noted, but thoughts must lead to actions to produce any sort of value for an employer. The action could be as "simple" as communicating a thought with others (not always simple!).
I sit in an office chair all day. That's it. No actual work, no actions, ever occur.
It's not even fair to claim me clicking on a mouse or klacking on a keyboard are "actions"... at some point in the future they'll plug a jack into my skull and even those minimal physical movements will be a thing of the past. We're just not there yet.
The sum total of everything I do is thought. Not action.
Perhaps you are a manager of a team. In that case your work is the communication with your staff, superiors, and peers, which must be complete, clear, and timely.
Or perhaps you are a programmer. In that case your work is the actual writing of code, testing, debugging, deploying, and communicating to manage feedback and plan the next round of work.
Knowing how to code up the next great new feature is not enough. It's not useful until it's coded and deployed, and that takes work.
I never said I "changed" anything. Little bits get flipped on a hard disk somewhere, or in a ram chip. A computer spits out a different answer, or a new answer, or retains an old answer. Maybe it answers things it didn't answer before.
But "work" and "change", these aren't words I'd ever use to describe that.
> Perhaps you are a manager of a team.
Nope, just got passed over for that promotion a few weeks ago.
> In that case your work is the communication with
Nope, that's not work either. Thinking out loud, maybe.
> In that case your work is the actual writing of code, testing, debugging, deploying,
Not work.
My grandfather worked. Tried to farm on and off throughout his life. Also held down a job as a construction worker well into his 60s. He couldn't do what I do (he's pretty sharp, I think he would have had the mind for it... but his fingers are damn near 2 inches wide).
To call what I do work would feels like an insult to him. Though I think he's proud that I do what I do, rather than what he did.
Work is physical labor. Not everyone is employed to do actual work. Some are in offices, some supervise. They even (often) earn/deserve what they get. Doesn't make it work though.
In a way, considering that the software I produce reduces the need for actual work, I do anti-work. Less of it is accomplished because of my efforts.
Or should the teacher award a subjective grade based on "well, this student's actually 'smarter', even though this other student worked a lot harder and completed the assigned work better"?
Tests, exams, and quizzes are assessments. Homework is, nominally, an attempt to coerce the student into enough practice that they succeed at the real assessment. Most practice will inevitably result in wrong answers and bad scores... if you could complete the practice perfectly you wouldn't need to practice or even take exams. If a student does poorly at homework and gets a 98 on an exam, only the exam should count towards a grade. Their poor scores on homework only indicate initial practice which served its purpose and allowed them to do better on their second (or third, or tenth) attempt which was the exam.
However, less logical human instincts prevail. Teachers who see this improvement don't think "hey that practice paid off" despite that being the most likely explanation (and the only good faith explanation). So, they recursively turn homework into its own assessment. Surely if they cheated to get the 98% on the exam, then using their homework scores will expose the lie. More tests are added, more homework is added, all in the instinctive hope that they surely can't cheat all the time and the predicted inconsistency will prove a guilt that was only theorized due to unfounded suspicion and a moral need for the children to be too stupid to succeed. After all, if these children could do that well, why would they even need teachers at all?
How many public school teachers did you have that demanded that you "show your work" and gave you bad grades for failure to do that? How does that even serve the purpose of assessment? They watched you do the math right there, at your desk. Were you pulling a calculator out of your rectum every time they turned their head, stuffing it back in before they spotted it? If the answers were right, if you did it there in their presence, then this didn't serve the purpose of assessment.
But all this goes even deeper. They simply don't know what to assess. They're too incompetent, too unintellectual to be able to assess any student. They rely on these bad measurements to they can maintain the pretense of assessing a student's education. It's nothing of the sort.
They make the poodles jump through hoops, because that's what the show is.
> Or should the teacher award a subjective grade
This particular phrase is so whacked-out, I don't even know where to begin.
Are grades "awards"? If they are awards, what can they be awards for, other than behavior? You don't award someone a prize for having blue eyes, or any other quality of their being. Why would you award one for them being educated?
Why would you give them a grade, some arbitrary number, a score? "Look, my education penis is bigger than yours!".
How could it ever be anything other than subjective? When they do a double-blind medical study, they're not saying "this pill is 68% effective for Tim Johnson, but 92% effective for John Timson!". That's because the score just doesn't mean much other than in the aggregate. Tim's 68% doesn't mean it was ineffective for him. Too many confounding factors were possible. It doesn't mean that John did better... he might have been healthier at the start of the study.
And if those aren't a measure of the pill, how can that individual number be measure of the patient? Could Tim's 68% have been higher if he had just followed the protocols more diligently? Wouldn't you find it absurd if someone suggested that?
But with teachers and their grades, if the student gets an F it's a measure of the student's failure and not the teacher's. Teachers' unions fight tooth and nail to prevent that public perception from becoming the norm.
Let's not even get into whether John's 92% pill effectiveness grade means he will live longer or be more healthy or any of the other desired effects of the medicine.
Have you ever even thought about any of this? Or did you just keep your head down close to the desk as you slowly scribbled out answers you hoped the poodle master would like? Have you shrugged off every criticism like this your entire life?
Remember all those startup articles that say "ideas are worthless" and "implementation is everything"?
School is a lot like that, and it's a valid measure. It's the rest of us that have a "fundamental misattribution error" in thinking grades are a measure of intelligence.
The lesson I took was "work hard, dummy" not "it's unfair that school is so dumb that it doesn't reward smart lazy people for not doing anything"
Just work hard - nobody cares if you feel like a poodle.
why did the "smart kid" not hand in her work? why did the "dumb kid? work more diligently?
what kind of environment is required to get the "smart kid" to work diligently on a consistent basis?
1. Provide challenges near the edge of ability. 2. Ask tons of questions to help the child achieve the goal. 3. Congratulate. 4. Ask tons of critical questions. 5. Go to 1.
Otherwise, it's a day care.
They found that there's an excellent correlation between the kids who wait and future life success.
But it also turns out that there's also an excellent correlation between kids who eat the marshmallow without waiting and kids who grow up in an environment where adults don't keep promises...
I question the assumptions at the foundations of these experiments. What if the decision to eat a marshmallow when you have the chance is a good strategy for a large number of people? It's easy to imply that people just need a bit of grit and hard work to succeed in life, when maybe the conclusion we should draw is that poor people often have to live hand-to-mouth. Maybe if we want to increase future life success we should focus on improving the security of their environment instead of attempting to teach them to be grittier.
I don't really know. Maybe they controlled for those variables. IANAS (I am not a scientist).
Perhaps not a complete solution, but the problem was at least addressed.
I'd be more successful in life if they didn't let me go hungry all of the time. At least be less bitter.
Citation for this please? I don't remember that being mentioned in the marshmallow paper.
"Marshmallow Test Revisited". University of Rochester. October 11, 2012.
Kidd, Celeste; Palmeri, Holly; Aslin, Richard N. (2013). "Rational snacking: Young children's decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability". Cognition 126 (1): 109–114. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004. PMC 3730121. PMID 23063236.
The HUGE question that is well worth investigating is how much parenting or good teaching or anything else can change a young learner's level of conscientiousness. Conscientiousness changes over the course of life, so it isn't completely fixed for anyone. It varies (somewhat) among identical twins, so environmental influences do matter in development of a given degree of conscientiousness. But so far we don't know a lot yet about what kind of parenting or what kind of teaching might work best to develop conscientiousness. That's well worth learning about. Calling it "grit" is regrettable because that prompts people to neglect the prior research literature.
AFTER EDIT: Comments below this comment asked for definitions of "conscientiousness." I'll put a few links here.
http://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/bigfive.html
http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/011382000/BigFive.ht...
Until that moment, I was amazingly conscientious, and combined with a very high IQ it was logical to assume that I'd do very well in life. I still have the same IQ, but I can't for the life of me finish an education, save money, or eat the dessert last.
Apparently, "grit" is dependent on functions located somewhere in the left frontal lobe [1], and if you damage that particular part of the brain, no amount of training can bring it back to what it was. After years of training and therapy, I'm still essentially a reckless, gifted child. I've learned wonderful tricks to keep me on track in life, but they only get me so far.
I suspect that parenting has a similar effect to my training: It teaches the tricks, but doesn't address the underlying reality of sheer, physiological ability.
[1]: Probably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
The way the word is informally used, a conscientious person is likely to be deemed conscientious by a supervisor due to obedience, rule following, punctuality, etc.
Is there a sense in which someone can be conscientious to his/her own life goals?
I think in cases where one's life goals diverge from pleasing authority figures, the word conscientiousness falls short (in informal meaning, at least).
Grit, on the other hand, seems to more aptly describe a person's dogged determination to achieve an outcome. I'm not sure which of the above are actually predictors of life outcomes.
Our culture demands that we do not accept "biological determinism" and so everything else needs to be (rhetorically) stretched to cover for it. That's how we get papers and thinkpieces on grit, stereotype threat, etc. These will be found to have minimal impact if the findings are replicated at all and so new factors will need to be invented.
Anecdotes from the OP aren't particularly damning but you can already see the authors angling to be the ones who feed the next cycle.
Does that mean just because you're not naturally talented that you can't become a phenomenal basketball player? No, unless you're really short/unathletic, with enough hard work and intelligence you can probably achieve the 90% of pro skill level, which is still really freaking good. Unfortunately, most people are more motivated by the desire to be pro than the love of playing basketball, so when they are eclipsed by more talented people (a good sign you aren't going to be able to go pro) they give up and do something else.
The good news is that in most areas of life, all that matters is how good you are, and there isn't some artificially cutoff goodness below which your skill is pointless and wasted. For this reason the professional sports analogy is usually unnecessarily demotivating.
If you want to get technical, there are less than 500 people who play professional basketball in the NBA. There are bunch of other leagues around where people can make a living.
For insight into how relatively important those factors are, we're probably better of studying the minor leagues...
In fairness, both are equally necessary. Talent without conscientiousness goes no further than conscientiousness without talent.
And that assumes that "intelligent" depends on something you are born with, and that your biology and genetic makeup don't change over time.
To put the point more concretely, it's as if you asked which is more important for basketball success: genetics or height.
[0] As well as some non-psychological traits. It seems to be helpful to be attractive, tall, etc. Precisely, psychological traits are a subset of the ways that genetics matter. But in either case, the two explanations are not competing.
Is this belief sufficient for great success? Of course not, you probably still need to be above average, talent wise, and be lucky. It is almost certainly necessary, however.
Or a third (overlapping) possibility: Maybe believing in hard work results in "success", but only for a fraction of people. Is the expected value of the belief necessarily positive?
Ie, take a simplified hypothetical universe where "success" is a binary possibility, with "utility" of 1, and where "hard work" is something that requires a utility investment of -0.1. Even if only those who choose "hard work" become successful regardless of talent or resources, if P("success"|"hard work" && $some_level_of_talent && $some_level_of_prior_resources) < 0.1, then it's still can be suboptimal to pursue "hard work" for the subset of the population with $some_level_of_talent and $some_level_of_prior_resources.
Edit: I am not saying @akavi holds this belief. Don't know if that was clear.
By the same token, I've met people who excel at pretty much everything they do because they understand that there is a process to mastery.
It's unfortunate, because I think grit does have real issues: it seems that a large number of studies have found that it doesn't add anything over the existing concept of conscientiousness:
http://scottbarrykaufman.com/study-alert-much-ado-grit-meta-...
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
This describes me exactly. I'm one of those people that never knew what they wanted to do and spent a lot of time just thinking about it and being worried about my future. After switching colleges once, majors 4 times, and seriously considering dropping out more than a couple of times, I finally landed on something that felt right enough I could force myself to get through when it was hard, without it feeling pointless. I found true motivation. My internal and external worlds aligned and I rocked it.
Unfortunately I think that feeling only lasted through getting my current job and I'm now back to contemplating the pointlessness/morality of my work day in and day out. The ultimate goal of my work is to replace people in a call center, to automate their jobs so they don't have to be hired anymore. I don't think I'll feel right about it until we figure out basic guaranteed incomes and what people are supposed to do to live if they don't work and all the Player Piano(Vonnegut) kind of stuff nobody talks about when they're just thinking about making money.
If you're working on something that you're passionate about, that is truly changing the world for the better, please let me know. I'd love to work on something and have no doubts about what I'm doing with my life again.
So please keep your doubt. The more I learn - and I've taken courses like crazy over the last couple of years - the more I doubt. It#s just that now my doubt is more specific.
So what you may want to do is replace "unspecific doubt" like the one exhibited in conspiracy theories by much more specific doubt. Donn't try to abandon doubt itself!
Also, life inherently only has exactly the meaning you decide it has, so looking outside yourself is prone to failure. Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4CvFWCULuI :-) Seriously, as soon as you look for something on the outside to tell you what you should do you limit yourself and start on a path to failure - because now, instead of taking responsibility for your choices you will say "but I had no choice!".
Lucky to have the good friends that I have? Still yes. Had I simply sat on the other side of the room of CS101 I'd have joined a different project team and have had different friends in school and to this day.
Lucky to be a gainfully employed programmer on salary? I feel I could do that 10 out of 10 times. Or 9 out of 10 times if it helps the conversation. In different realities I'd work at different companies. Specialized my talents differently. Probably even live in a different city. Definitely have a different partner. But I'd have a good job somewhere. In that I'm confident.
I've been "unlucky" in that no project I've ever worked on has ever blown up. Never seen a fat bonus. I've still drive the same 1999 Volkswagen Jetta I got in 2004. No fancy car for me. No lucky stock options that hit it big.
I'm arguably lucky to be a programmer. Born in a good year for it. But I don't think I'm lucky to have a good job that pays well. If I were born a few years earlier I'd simply have picked a different career. I could have been a lawyer. Or a mechanical engineer. Even a doctor. I find a lot of things interesting. For careers I'd have always picked something interesting that pays well. I like teaching people quite a lot. But it doesn't pay well. So it was never a consideration. If teachers averaged 6 figures it'd have been on my short list as well.
A long article was very recently posted either here or on reddit - was it the Washington Post? Don't remember unfortunately - about mass murderers. It looked at the actual research and tried to dispel myths like "they are all mentally ill, so if we just fix health care for mental illness to discover such people early we can solve much of the problem". The actual statistics showed that less than 10% of mass murderers (I think that was "more than two") had a treatable mental illness. Turned out that the major determining factor instead was "environment". Of course, individual factors such as certain personality traits play a role - but they are the same ones that can be found in successful people (it helps to be "full of yourself" and not dwell too much on what other people think, unless it's important for your own success). Whether such traits make you a murderer depends on your environment much more so than anything else.
And here we get to "luck": Environment is a lot of luck, the initial settings matter most of all (the womb you crawled out of). Environment can greatly enhance - or dampen - whatever you inherited genetically. Who will do better, an Einstein born in a favela of Rio de Janeiro surrounded by gangs, or an average guy born to wealthy parents? Example: G.W Bush... Those are extreme examples, but even if you only look at relatively equal American middle class examples, but one ends up in a group of peers mostly interested in girls and booze, the other one in a group of kids with more academic parents and more interest in learning than party will be influenced by the group.
"Conscientiousness" is the term of art. It's part of the Big 5 personality model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits ) which has its own various promoters and refuters. Inasmuch as the literature is contradictory it's because it's not a model that works super well for actually doing stuff, beyond marginal effects (more conscientious worker == better, all else equal) & tautologies (hard workers work hard and do better at hard jobs that reward hard work).
> “Things like grit and 10,000 hours are mindsets that are very misleading because they are consequences not causes — they are lagging indicators of performance,” said Todd Rose, who is the author of The End of Average, a book that illustrates how averages are flawed in understanding human achievement.
If we take grit to be "fire-in-the-belly" I have observed as a parent, mentor/coach of high school and adults and high performing team lead that it has several characteristics that a parent, coach, mentor, manager and even peer should be aware of.
I like the "fire" analogy. As a parent I can put water on my child's fire and put it out. I can be over-bearing, abusive etc. As a manager there are many things I can do to do the same like micro manage them.
As a parent I can help flame the fire (think adding fuel and oxygen). I can give them earned respect, greater levels of responsibilities and coach them with a growth mindset.
I have parented, managed and mentored with an intention to make the flame lager since I first had a manager responsibility and discussed this concept with Dr. Michael Stonebreaker in the early 1980s. So far it has seemed to work for me.
Genetics and early environment seems to me to be very important to starting life with a fire-in-the-belly. But what gets done with that by the individual and those that have some control over their paths early on makes a big difference.
But let us not forget that to be good at engineering, for example, one has to be able to conceptualize and visualize in their minds-eye. Having grit does not make up for that. Having both is a killer for success. My observations only and yes they are not scientific.
Seems obvious to me.
For life, it may not matter. You have more options to find something where you excel more easily or are more passionate about something.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/grit/
I am not sure what I think. There is a definite correlation between grit and success. The people that try to do something once and quit are the people I know that are, 15 years after high school, working at the local pizza shack. The people I know that could try and try and try to get something done, are the pizza now doctors and programmers and lawyers.
But I also know that most of the people I see as gritty had the "better" parents. So maybe it was indeed a trailing indicator.
I was not an exceptional student, would have been but I worked 35 hours a week while attending college 12-19 hours a week plus studying till the library closed Sunday through Thursday.
I may not be a ninja developer or whatever but I'd honestly put money on myself over some genius-flake. And if someone has grit + genius... well, watch out because it would be amazing to see in action. Maybe that's Einstein in his later years. I'm sure everyone with a high IQ believes that description fits them, but in general geniuses don't have to try very hard so they never know what 'grit' is. Or what it takes for the rest of us.
I do think grit is partially taught in ways that are completely non-related to mental exercise. I grew up in the midwest in a house with no air conditioning because my father thought it would make us soft to have it. Thankfully the old man did buy us a Commodore. Yes, it gets hot in the midwest- just as hot as anywhere else in the summer. I was even raised in cloth diapers and I'm under 35... to give an idea of how old school. They also made sure I always worked, been working without lapse since I was 12 years old. I've worked on a hog farm in the July heat from 4AM-noon. While I was born in 82, I don't feel like a 'Millennial' at all. I feel like a very gritty person mentally and physically that is rare anymore but has paid off in ways. But definitely feel more in common with my brother's generation (born in '78, GenX) or maybe even older, less pampered gen.
From my perspective, American society is severely missing grit. People are going to have to toughen up because this softie society won't last forever. But I don't think people know the difference between false posturing tough guy aggression based on insecurity is and what real grit means. Too much tough guy gangster rap for the lower class and too many get-rich-quit-or-I-give-up flakes in the more fortunate classes.
I've heard multiple people in my lifetime tell me they "won't go to work for less than $15 an hour" or won't get out of bed for less than that. I've suffered years through horrible jobs to build a resume. Just to appear reliable, which I am.
Most people don't know what it takes to get ahead for those without lots of money and without a naturally high IQ. Sometimes it sucks but lays the groundwork for later on. It's about character.
There is pendulum where for a few years people will have "under estimated" intelligence, or patience, or genetics, or friends, or parents. These articles come out, and suddenly everyone "overrates" those factors to the detriment of others. Then the article moves on to the underrated factor.
Unless people are actually ascribing various quantities to these factors, I don't know how "under" or "over" the estimates are from the actual influence of the factors.
Another point raised in this article is the idea of being able to focus on one task/goal until it's completed. Learning to multitask definitely detracts from one's ability to focus on single tasks/goals and make true progress. However, in my college and high school experiences, the structures didn't stress these common sense principles for learning enough.
It's not just overrated, it can be actively harmful.
He goes further on this and other topics in the book "The Myth of the Spoiled Child"
I think the whole point is to get a better idea of what it means to be "the right person". What kind of traits can we develop to make ourselves more likely to be "the right person"? Nobody is sitting on the couch all day crossing their fingers hoping that they're the right person to create a tech startup, for example.