Does Students’ Grit Predict Their School Achievement Above and Beyond Their Personality, Motivation, and Engagement? It seems to have little explanatory power.

Does Students’ Grit Predict Their School Achievement Above and Beyond Their Personality, Motivation, and Engagement? Ricarda Steinmayr, Anne F. Weidinger, Allan Wigfield. Contemporary Educational Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2018.02.004

Highlights
•    In 2 independent samples, we investigated grit’s relation to school achievement.
•    Established conceptually and empirically related constructs were also considered.
•    Only Grit – perseverance of effort predicted GPA when including the other constructs.
•    Perseverance of effort did not predict GPA when controlling for previous achievement.
•
    Results question grit’s relevance for school achievement, at least in the short term.

Abstract: Grit—individuals’ perseverance of effort and consistency of interests—was introduced in 2007 as new construct that predicts different achievement outcomes. To date, most studies examining grit’s prediction of achievement have not included other predictors in their analyses. Therefore, we assessed grit’s incremental validity for school achievement above theoretically and empirically related predictors, in two adolescent student samples from Germany. Study 1 (N = 227) examined grit’s relative importance for students’ school grades (GPA, math, German) when controlling for prior school grades, the Big Five personality traits, school engagement, values, expectancies for success, and self-efficacy. In Study 2 (N = 586), intelligence, conscientiousness, and established constructs from motivation and engagement literatures were controlled to investigate grit’s relative importance for GPA, math grades and test performance in math. In both studies, relative weight analyses revealed that the grit subscales added little explanatory power. Results question grit’s unique prediction of scholastic success.

Keywords: grit; personality; motivation; school engagement; school performance; intelligence; relative weight analysis