Predicting Educational Attainment: Does Grit Compensate for Low Levels of Cognitive Ability?

Abstract

This study examined the role of cognitive ability in moderating grit's predictive effect on educational outcomes. Using a large, representative sample of young adults, we estimated multivariate regression models for the probability of graduating from high school, enrolling in college, earning any college degree, and earning a college degree. For each outcome, the effect of grit (and, alternatively, consistency of interest and perseverance of effort) was allowed to differ for students in each quartile of the cognitive ability distribution. We found that the predicted effect of grit-which is dominated by the effect of perseverance-is almost entirely concentrated among students at both the high and low ends of the cognitive ability distribution. We also found that grit's predictive power increases with each successive educational outcome for high-ability students, but not for low-ability students. The findings are consistent with the notion that highability students adopt self-regulated learning processes that exploit their grit, especially as educational tasks become more challenging. For low-ability students, it appears that grit plays a compensatory role. Relatively few low-ability students attain each educational outcome, but those who do appear to benefit from the effective substitution of grit for cognitive ability.

New wine in an old bottle? A facet-level perspective on the added value of Grit over BFI–2 Conscientiousness

“…The correlations with fluid intelligence in Model A corroborated some of the earlier findings on the non-significant relationship between fluid intelligence and Grit [1,28,32]. The first-order Grit facets did not show a statistically significant relationship, whereas the firstorder facets Organization and Productiveness did.…”

“…Both the incremental criterion validity of Grit over Conscientiousness and the value of distinguishing between Grit-Perseverance and Grit-Consistency have received at best mixed support by previous research. On the one hand, numerous studies have supported the predictive validity of Grit, particularly in relation to academic outcomes [1,2,11,[28][29][30][31]. In addition, some studies have suggested Grit's incremental predictive validity over Conscientiousness for other domains such as career success, career engagement, and exercise behavior [10,[32][33][34][35].…”

“…Regarding fluid intelligence, the majority of previous studies found Grit to be largely independent of fluid intelligence and other measures of basic cognitive abilities [1,12,28,32], a finding that has been meta-analytically confirmed [7]. Based on such findings, proponents of grit have claimed that Grit is a resource that could be fostered independently of cognitive ability-and that could be an equally-or even more-potent predictor of life success than cognitive ability [56].…”

“…Earlier studies showed that domain-specific measures to assess Grit such as academic Grit [28,90] can give a more in depth understanding of the construct. We would like to encourage future research to expand our findings on the relationships between Grit and indicators of life success with a domain-specific approach to Grit.…”

NEETs in Latin America and the Caribbean: Skills, Aspirations, and Information

“…We also include the standardised results of the Grit test that measures the capability of individuals of achieving long term goals. We expect that individuals scoring high on the test are more likely to be enrolled in education and/or working (Mendolia & Walker, 2014; Light & Nencka, 2019).…”