Measuring Perseverance and Passion in Distance Education Students: Psychometric Properties of the Grit Questionnaire and Associations With Academic Performance

Abstract

With modern technological advances, distance education has become an increasingly important education delivery medium for, for example, the higher education provided by open universities. Among predictive factors of successful learning in distance education, the effects of non-cognitive skills are less explored. Grit, the dispositional tendency to sustain trait-level passion and long-term goals, has raised much research interest and gained importance for predicting academic achievement. The Grit Questionnaire, measuring Perseverance of Effort and Consistency of Interests, has been shown to be a reliable instrument in traditional university student populations. However, the measurement and predictive validity of this questionnaire is still unknown for adult distance education university students who differ from traditional students in various ways (e.g., having a wider range of student ages). Based on a sample of 2,027 students from a distance education university, this study assessed the psychometric properties of the two-factor structure grit measured by the Grit Questionnaire. The findings suggest that the short form of the Grit Questionnaire is a potentially useful assessment tool for measuring the grit construct for distance learning higher education and that the Consistency of Interests factor is especially relevant to consider the improvement of learning performance for distance education in terms of courses credit and exam attempts. The measurement precision of the Perseverance of Effort factor, however, should be improved in future research to provide higher measurement accuracy and broader item coverage.

A cross-cultural investigation on perseverance, self-regulated learning, motivation, and achievement

“…More recent research also showed the association between perseverance and achievement (Bettinger 2018;Xu et al 2020). In the current study, we therefore focused on PE (from hereon referred to as perseverance).…”

Medical Students’ Socioeconomic Status and Academic Performance in Medical School

“…Individuals who possess grit tend to be resilient, self-controlled, and ambitious. Studies conducted at chiropractic, physical therapy, and dental schools found that grittier students performed better on their standardized exams and concluded that the grit scale could be used as an additional non-academic measure for admissions [19][20][21]. We believe that low-SES students who may not have performed as well on their entrance exam as their high-SES counterparts would benefit from an additional evaluation, such as the Grit scale, to assess their potential ability to perform on exams as they traverse through their medical education.…”

Examining the Impact of Passion for Music and Mentorship Quality on Students’ Career-Related Psychological Outcomes: The Mediating Roles of Self-Perception of Emotions and Competence

“…In contrast, the relationship between OP and well-being was either non-existent in Study 1 or negative in Study 2. The potential relationship between HP and OP for studying and other elements that are integral to the student experience remains unexplored [7]. Speci cally, empirical studies in the context of music students' career-related outcomes have received limited inquiry of the passion construct.…”