I read Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (introduced here). But I just saw Tough’s amazing thesis again in Business Insider.
The #1 predictor of student success is not IQ, talent, or luck/”being in the right place at the right time”. It’s grit. Determination. “The ability to withstand stress and move past failures to achieve a goal is the best indicator of future success.” What’s great is that grit can be learned and enhanced throughout a student’s life, even dramatically if they develop a disciplined passion for what they’re learning. Aimee Groth writes:
In a paper, “Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ In Predicting Academic Performance Of Adolescents,” Duckworth and colleague Martin Seligman tested 164 eighth graders “recruited from a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse magnet public school” in the Northeast for self-discipline and IQ. They measured the students in the fall and spring through self-assessment, a behavioral delay-of-gratification task, and a survey of study and lifestyle habits, along with a group IQ test. They found that “self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.”
Read the whole thing.
Related Post: Interview with Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed