Is ‘grit’ overrated in explaining student success?
I worked for 5 years as a high school teacher. In my observation, the &quot;smartest kid in class&quot; could be left in the dust by a &quot;dumb kid&quot; who decided to work hard.<p>I use quotes because it does raise the question of who is really the smart one there.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If anything, `grit` would be underrated in measuring student success if we pegged it at 100% of the variance.<p>That said, &quot;student success&quot; is only one measure and is, in a number of ways, wildly artificial.<p>There was an adage to the effect of &quot;you only learn what you pay attention to&quot;, but in this case we might also say &quot;you&#x27;re only graded on what you do&quot;<p>If student success is measured in grades, and you&#x27;re only graded on what you do, then doing work (aka: grit) is the only thing that matters.