Reciprocal relations between grit and academic achievement: A longitudinal study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2019.02.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Grit and academic achievement were examined in a longitudinal study.

  • The subjects were elementary school students in grades four, five and six.

  • The results showed reciprocal relations between grit and academic achievement.

  • Only perseverance but not consistency facet of grit had significant effects.

Abstract

Previous research investigating the relations between grit and academic achievement has mostly relied on cross-sectional design, and less is known about the direction of these effects. Based on social cognitive theory, this longitudinal study investigated the reciprocal relations between overall grit, as well as the two aspects of grit, perseverance of effort (PE) and consistency of interest (CI), and academic achievement among 193 Chinese primary school students. Results indicated reciprocal effects between overall grit and academic achievement, but PE and CI showed differential roles. Specifically, PE at Time 1 accounted for 2.3% variance in academic achievement at Time 2 after controlling students' age, family SES, self-control and previous academic achievement. Reverse relation was found that previous achievement level contributed to later PE development. However, CI failed to predict academic achievement and vice versa. These findings reveal a mutually reinforcing pattern between PE and academic achievement and elucidate the sociocognitive attributes of grit.

Introduction

Grit is defined as person's trait-level perseverance and passion for long-term goals (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). Over the past decade, grit has attracted increasing attention from educational psychologists and emerged as a significant noncognitive predictor of students' academic achievement (Duckworth et al., 2007; Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). Although the correlational relations between grit and academic achievement are well documented, the directionality of effect between grit and academic achievement remain to be clarified. Though it is believed that grit enhances academic achievement (Duckworth et al., 2007; Duckworth, Kirby, Tsukayama, Berstein, & Ericsson, 2011; Weber & Ruch, 2012; Wolters & Hussain, 2015), additional evidence from longitudinal studies is warranted. In addition, recent findings have conceived of grit as either a socioemotional variable or a within-person variable that shows daily fluctuations (O'Neal, 2017; Wong & Vallacher, 2017), which implies that grit is susceptible to internal or external influences and thus can be developed or impeded by achievement feedback. This idea is in line with the social cognitive theory, which posits a reciprocal determinism between self-efficacy (or self-concept) and performance (Bandura, 1986; Huang, 2011). It is possible that performance in the form of academic achievement can change one's perseverance and consistency towards learning goals despite difficulties and setbacks and, therefore, show mutually reinforcing relations. To our knowledge, however, no existing research has used longitudinal studies to examine the potential reciprocal relations between grit and achievement. Therefore, in the current study, we extend prior work by empirically examining the cross-lagged relations between grit and academic achievement using longitudinal designs and theoretically extend the knowledge of grit as sociocognitive variable.

Grit was originally conceptualized as a stable personality trait that consisted of two components (Duckworth et al., 2007): perseverance of effort (PE) and consistency of interest (CI). PE describes a participant's reported tendency to sustain the time and effort necessary to accomplish long-term goals even in the face of adversities and distractions. CI, on the other hand, reflects a participant's tendency to adhere to certain goals on long timescales. According to its definition, grit is relevant to success outcomes due to its emphasis on task persistence and consistency in goal pursuing, which are prerequisites for higher accomplishments (Andersson & Bergman, 2011).

Indeed, past research has found positive relations between grit and academic outcomes, including engagement, self-efficacy, academic adjustment, academic achievement, retention, and graduation rates (Bowman, Hill, Denson, & Bronkema, 2015; Duckworth et al., 2007; Duckworth & Quinn, 2009; Muenks, Wigfield, Yang, & O'Neal, 2017; Sturman & Zappala-Piemme, 2017). In their pioneering research, Duckworth et al. (2007) discovered that grit positively predicted educational attainment among adults, grade point average (GPA) among Ivy League undergraduates, retention in a rigorous summer training program among cadets at West Point and adolescents' rankings in a national spelling competition. Overall, grit accounted for an average of 4% variance in these success outcomes. These findings have also been generalized in subsequent studies using an objective achievement indicator (GPA) among middle school students, college students, ethnic minorities, and students from Eastern cultural backgrounds (Bowman et al., 2015; Datu, Valdez, & King, 2016; Duckworth & Quinn, 2009; Wolters & Hussain, 2015).

Theoretically, the original grit researchers may agree that grit promotes higher academic achievement. Considering that academic success is a long-term goal full of difficulties that require students to devote time as well as regulate themselves to conquer challenges, grit triggers students to engage in academic tasks, which leads to higher academic achievement. As supporting evidence, adolescents' reported levels of grit positively predicted their final ranks in a competition in which deliberate practice showed a mediating role (Duckworth et al., 2011). That is, gritty students undergo repeated practices during preparation, which accounts for their later achievement. However, previous studies did not control for the initial level of achievement, which may include confounding influences. Additionally, this previous study focused on a specific avocational context, which limited the external validity of the findings. Wolters and Hussain (2015) assessed how grit predicted later college students' expected GPAs after controlling for their reported cumulative high school GPAs. However, the use of subjective evaluations of achievement, rather than actual grades, makes this method insufficient to provide more accurate estimations between variables. In addition, recent studies have questioned the strong association between grit and academic achievement (Credé, Tynan, & Harms, 2017; Rimfeld, Kovas, Dale, & Plomin, 2016; Tucker-Drob, Briley, Engelhardt, Mann, & Harden, 2016; Tucker-Drob & Harden, 2015), especially when similar constructs such as self-control and conscientiousness were also considered (Duckworth & Gross, 2014; Muenks et al., 2017; Rimfeld et al., 2016). Therefore, more evidence is needed to solidify the predicting effect of grit on achievement with methodologically sound design. By implementing a cross-lagged design, we hope to replicate the grit-to-achievement relations when 1) initial achievement levels was controlled; 2) the confounding effect of self-control was ruled out; 3) objective indicators of academic achievement was used. We hypothesize that grit can contribute to later academic achievement after controlling for initial academic achievement and self-control.

H1: Grit (Time 1) will positively predict academic achievement (Time 2) when previous academic achievement (Time 1) and self-control (Time 1) are controlled.

Although gritty people are less inclined to be discouraged by failures (Duckworth et al., 2007) and are self-motivated in the absence of external rewards (Duckworth et al., 2007; Duckworth et al., 2011), grit itself is malleable state. In line with the notion, positive psychologists have classified grit as part of character strength, which is a malleable disposition that benefits healthy human development (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015). Duckworth (2016) has also proposed that grit is a mutable rather than crystallized personality trait that is responsive to targeted interventions. Moreover, recent studies have suggested that grit is prone to influences from both within- and between-individual factors. For example, daily diary study found that more than half of grit's variance (51%) regressed on a within-individual level (Wong & Vallacher, 2017), demonstrating its sensitivity to within-person variations on short timescales. In contrast, O'Neal (2017) discovered the classroom peer effects of grit on later individual literacy achievements among dual language learners. One possible explanation is that students modeled perseverance in achievements based on how their gritty peers persevered in challenging tasks (Schunk, Hanson, & Cox, 1987). Another study conducted by O'Neal, Goldthrite, Weston Riley, and Atapattu (2018) have also found that emotional engagement predicted later grit levels when previous grit levels were controlled.

In the broader range of human behavior, the social cognitive theory has explicated potential achievement-to-grit relations. According to Bandura (1986), self-efficacy is concerned with the belief that one is capable of succeeding at particular tasks and navigating one's environment. While people with high levels of self-efficacy achieve higher grades and persist longer (Lent, Brown, & Larkin, 1984), the opposite relation is also true, namely, that perceived self-efficacy can accumulate through successful experiences (Usher & Pajares, 2008). For example, a reciprocal effect exists between perceived efficacy for self-regulated learning and school grades during the transition from junior to high school (Caprara et al., 2008). Additionally, junior high school grades contributed to academic self-efficacy beliefs at the age of 16, which in turn contributed to high school grades, over and above the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and prior academic achievement (Caprara, Vecchione, Alessandri, Gerbino, & Barbaranelli, 2011). Considering that both grit and self-efficacy emphasize how vigorous and persistent an effort one exerts in the face of difficulties and aversive experiences (see also Bandura, 1986), it is reasonable to assume that the self-efficacy derived from achievement experiences contributes to changes in grit. Similarly, research on academic self-concept has also implicated a mutual determinism between grit and academic achievement. Academic self-concept refers to students' perceptions of their competence in academic domains (Shavelson, Hubner, & Stanton, 1976). Instead of adopting a unidirectional causation stance, abundant research has discovered the robust mutually reinforcing relations between self-concept and academic achievement (Huang, 2011; Vollet, Kindermann, & Skinner, 2017). That is, self-concept enhances academic achievement, and academic achievement also contributes to grit development. Moreover, a mutually reinforcing loop was also found between grit and self-concept clarity. Using daily diary designs, Wong and Vallacher (2017) assessed whether daily self-concept clarity and grit predicted one another's next-day levels. The results indicated that daily fluctuations in self-concept clarity were positively associated with fluctuations in goal pursuing and vice versa. It is possible that students clarified their self-concept after successful learning experiences (indicated by higher academic achievements) and that their clear understanding of self in turn fostered later commitments and perseverance to learning goals. In addition, the self-determination theory has also illustrated how the satisfaction of psychological needs can internalize and promote students' learning motivation (Jang, Kim, & Reeve, 2012). When students undertake months of hard work and receive higher academic achievements, their competence needs would be satisfied, and they would therefore be motivated to persevere in a challenging task.

To summarize, in the current study, we posit that grit is a malleable sociocognitive variable that can contribute to goal-oriented behaviors and be affected by internal (e.g., self-efficacy, self-concept) or external (e.g., successful experience) factors. We hypothesized that academic achievement could also promote later grit development.

H2: Previous academic achievement (Time 1) will positively predict subsequently reported level of grit (Time 2) when initial grit scores (Time 1) are controlled.

The present study used cross-lagged designs to test the following: (1) the stable coefficient of grit across time and (2) the unidirectional and bidirectional relations between grit and academic achievement among Chinese primary school students. We proposed and tested four possible models that depicted the possible mechanisms underlying the relations between grit and academic achievement. First, we tested a baseline model that included only across-time stability effects (see Model 1 in Fig. 1). Second, we examined whether a standard causal model (cross-lagged paths from grit to academic achievement; see Model 2 in Fig. 1), a reverse-causation model (cross-lagged paths from academic achievement to grit; see Model 3 in Fig. 1), or reciprocal-causation model (cross-lagged paths from grit to academic achievement plus cross-lagged paths from grit to academic achievement; see Model 4 in Fig. 1) provided a better fit of the data over the baseline model. Third, we concluded by examining a final model of best fit between grit and academic achievement. Four competing models are depicted in Fig. 1.

In addition, self-ratings, parental ratings, and objective evaluations were implemented to reduce common method errors and provide more precise estimations. Gender, age, family SES and self-control were controlled to rule out potential confounding effects. We first investigated the relations between overall grit and academic achievement, and then following the recommendation of Muenks et al. (2017), we investigated the differential effects of PE and CI separately.

Section snippets

Participants

224 students from on key primary school in Beijing participated in the first measurement wave, among which 193 participants took part in the second measurement. Therefore, the final sample consisted of 193 students (94 boys and 99 girls) who participated in both measurement occasions; students were, on average, 10.63 years old (SD = 0.89) at the first measurement occasion. Of the final sample, 64 students were from grade four, 68 from grade five, and 61 from grade six. A total of 21 out of the

Preliminary analysis

Means, standard deviations, and intercorrelations among all variables are shown in Table 1. The concurrent correlation between overall grit and academic achievement was significant (T1: r = 0.19, p = .007; T2: r = 0.26, p < .001), similarly, PE and academic achievement were positively correlated (T1: r = 0.21, p = .003; T2: r = 0.27, p < .001); However, CI was positively related to academic achievement at T2 (r = 0.15, p = .04) but not at T1 (r = 0.11, p = .13). In addition, ANOVAs for repeated

Discussion

Using a longitudinal design, the present study investigated the bidirectional relations between grit and academic achievement with a primary school student sample. Partially supporting our hypothesis, the reciprocal effects existed between overall grit and academic achievement. But follow-up analysis confirmed that this was due to PE carried the effects. In other words, only PE but not CI showed mutually reinforcing relations with academic achievement. Specifically, initial PE was predictive of

Conclusion

Despite the limitations, the longitudinal nature of the study enables the researcher to examine how grit has an impact on later academic achievement in more rigorous manner, which extends the validity of previous findings. This study also offers new insight into the reciprocal reinforcing relations between perseverance aspect of grit and academic achievement and elucidates the sociocognitive attributes of grit. Future research is needed to assess the mechanisms (e.g., self-efficacy,

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by Beijing Social Science Foundation (No. 17JYB008).

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