An article in Education Week reports on research about “grit” or perseverance at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Scholars reported that it had more bearing on academic outcomes than on creativity.
“Magdalena G. Grohman, the associate director of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas, argues that grittiness is not the end-all, be-all for student success. “When you look at it, these [areas studied by Ms. Duckworth] are well-defined areas and the rules for achievement are well-defined in those areas,” she said. “We know what to do to get good grades, what to do to stay in military school, and what to do to win in contests such as spelling bees. The rules are pretty clear on what the achievement is and what success is in these domains. But what about creative achievement?”
“In two separate analyses of college undergraduates by Ms. Grohman and her colleagues, students filled out detailed questionnaires on personality, extracurricular activities, and grades, as well as data on prior creative activities and accomplishments. Students’ ratings on field surveys of grit and openness to experience were compared to their academic and extracurricular records.
“Ms. Grohman found that neither grit nor two related characteristics of consistency and perseverance predicted a student’s success in various types of creative endeavors, including visual and performing art, writing, scientific ingenuity, or even creativeness in everyday problem-solving.”These are ‘no results’ that we are actually excited about,” Ms. Grohman said during a presentation on creativity. “Creative achievement and grit, intellectual creativity and grit, everyday creativity and grit: no effects whatsoever.”
Rather, a student’s openness to new experiences was most closely associated with his or her likelihood of accomplishing creative works, she found.”
“In a separate study, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, an associate research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., compared the academic records and the reports of high school students, their peers, and teachers….
“Ms. Pringle found that neither students’ individual scores on tests of grit nor their teachers’ ratings of high persistence were related to how creative they were on group projects….
“However, as in the previous study, individual ratings of students’ openness to new experiences and teachers’ ratings of students with passion for their work did predict who would be the most creative.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
Interesting new research on the lack of connection between greet and creativity. However, I do think in order to make it in most creative endeavors, you have to be persistent and have stamina to deal with failure.
Of course it takes perseverance to succeed in creative fields such as writing, theater, etc. Unless exceedingly fortunate to be discovered by some huge producer, folks get to wait a lot of tables, clean a lot of hotel rooms, watch a lot of rich brats, et al.
As for scientific creativity, that also takes a lot of grit, especially when facing entrenched “consensus” science. Just ask Galileo, Stephen Meyer or any scientists that doesn’t drink the IPCC Kool-Aid.
Delayed gratification is key. True grit is just a measure of sandpaper roughness or a John Wayne movie. Not a measure of learning.
I’m not so sure. I agree that delayed gratification is important, but learning principles are clear that success breeds success. If we simply expect students to wait to see their success, it may never happen because students give up along the way. Grit/determination/perseverance/ or whatever you want to call it are important attributes for learners. And, we must teach students the importance of these attributes. Telling a 10 year old that ‘someday in the future’ you’ll be glad you paid attention in class is not a great strategy for teachers.
Different amounts of delay. A ten year old should see rewards sooner than a 20 year old college student. I agree perseverance is important, but not a measure of learning nor a metric. I see them as two sides of the same coin.
“Grit” is a by-product of interest/meaningfulness/relevance/necessity, etc. If you find something interesting on its own merits, relevant/meaningful in your life and/or necessary for survival, chances are you’re going to stick with it. Too often nowadays, though, “grit” is used in connection with sticking to tasks that are utterly meaningless and boring. How in the world can anyone be creative in connection with a task they find utterly irrelevant to their life? And why would we expect creativity under such circumstances? If we really want creativity, we have to allow people true control and ownership of their lives rather than just expecting them to do what they’re told.
I read a comment once on one of the Amazon forums from a guy who had worked at a grocery store as a cashier/stocker. Even at that low level, the owners of the store welcomed his input (and the input of other workers). Management told them that they were the ones closest to the customers, so if they’re hearing complaints or seeing problems, they should try to develop a solution and approach management with it. He said that management really did listen to input and the results were beneficial to all, employees and management alike. Employees felt satisfied with their jobs and the store became the most popular in the area.
But then the family who owned the store sold out to a big-name, Wall Street type firm. From then on workers were expected to just do what they were told and were beaten down if they tried to suggest improvements, even when things were grossly wrong. Employees stopped trying to improve things, customers got frustrated and within a short time the store was closed (and the execs probably walked out with a handsome bonus).
You can’t govern like the store did under the Wall Street firm and expect creativity. You might get “grit”, depending on how desperate people are for their jobs, but not creativity.
Dienne: I have followed this blog since day one.
There have been thousands and thousands and thousands of comments. And I have learned much from many of them.
This is absolutely one of the best comments on any topic.
“Much said in few words” doesn’t begin to cover it.
Insanely krazy props.
😎
This brings up the issue of how we teach, and test?, for attributes in the affective domain; of which probably have more to do with one’s future success than just test scores, ex. grit is a better predictor of future “contribution to GDP” (not that GDP determines “success” or being a “responsible citizen”).
So, how do we test for: grit, determination, self-denial, charity, compassion, going-the-extra-mile (all of which the real world requires and rewards)? Are these part of our explicit or hidden curriculum? Should our curriculum mandate a class in ethics and morality, or do secularists and atheist cry “this is religion” whenever these attempts are made. Just where is the boundary between “religion” (which all have, in some form) and morality or things like work-ethic?
“Should our curriculum mandate a class in ethics and morality, or do secularists and atheist cry “this is religion” whenever these attempts are made. Just where is the boundary between “religion” (which all have, in some form) and morality or things like work-ethic?”
Why do you think that it would only be “secularists and atheist cry ‘this is religion'”? (and no, that’s not rhetorical, and yes, I expect an answer to that question) No, religionistas do not hold the title to ethics and morals. Religion is not needed for one to be ethical and moral.
And no, not all have “religion” in some form. That’s elitist religionista thinking for they cannot see beyond the parameters dictated to them by their “religion”.
And yes, there should be a mandatory class at the secondary level that covers ethics and morality and how those are different from religious beliefs.
“So, how do we test for: grit, determination, self-denial, charity, compassion, going-the-extra-mile (all of which the real world requires and rewards)?”
You don’t really mean test as in paper and pencil test do you? No one ever thought of testing my generation for how charitable we were or how much determination we had. Self denial, compassion? NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE TESTED! It seems like the more we study something, the more anal we get about it. Are we really so incapable of recognizing these qualities that we need to quantify them? It really isn’t all that difficult to identify an individual who exemplifies one or more of these traits without reference to someone’s contrived rubric.
I don’t mean to be “going off” on you, Rick, as I seriously doubt this is what you had in mind. I just couldn’t not state what I see as so obvious. Am I missing something ?
I used to dread the latest pop psych books in the 70s. Pop ed is no better. Can’t someone just relegate folks like Paul Tough and Amanda Ripley to something like a Gladwell Series.
Just as “accountability” is a so-called reformers’ euphemism for setting teachers and public schools up for attack via high stakes exams, “disruptive innovation” for wholesale privatization, and “no excuses” a proxy for repressive and behaviorist treatment of Black children, “grit” is a euphemism for dogged, unquestioning adherence to authority and it’s ever-increasing demands.
When I think of “grit” I think of marathoners, Navy Seals, people with long lasting marriages, and fire fighters. They are single-minded and determined, but it does not necessarily imply they are creative. To me creativity springs from passion and an ability to be a divergent thinker.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Actually I’d put long-lasting marriage in the latter categories 😉
It seems to me that people are often at their most creative when they are trying to figure out ways of avoiding work.
That doesn’t mean creative people are lazy, just that they are inspired by visions of laziness.
Tough, et al., push an extrinsically-motivated approach to teaching students certain habits of mind without any serious consideration of what larger social factors make many students, particularly those in high poverty, less prone than what we might expect or hope would be the case. This is a very political choice on Tough’s part, and no doubt explains his appeal to social conservatives and the gung-ho, no-excuses charter boosters. The problem is that Horatio Alger doesn’t live here anymore and in fact, for the vast, vast majority of American poor, never did. But isn’t it pretty to think so?
Persistence in the solving of challenging mathematical problems entails both attitude and actual knowledge that real math doesn’t succumb to 20 seconds of reading and computing. Since we teach most children just the opposite, is it surprising that so many kids, including those with less challenging socio-economic backgrounds, cave in if they can’t understand or solve a problem within a minute? Grit has nothing to do with it., or if it does, it’s a very different sort of grit from what Tough & Company are purveying.
“But isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Yes, beautiful, it makes me tear up! (double entendre meant)
Brilliant.
Michael Paul Goldenberg:
I don’t disagree with you, but I am interested in your Hemingway allusion. Persistence has everything to do with Hemingway’s creative influence on generations of writers. If he hadn’t kept at it, day in and day out, his idea of how to write prose fiction would never have seen the light of day. Not to mention the brilliance of the Sun Also Rises.
There’s a difference between being creative–having creative ideas–and actually making things that have an impact on people. There’s a great website founded by Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen. Belsky makes the point that creative ideas are easy to come up with, but executing them requires persistence and a lot more.
http://99u.com/
I’m just pleased someone else knows his Hemingway.
This discussion about creativity should include mention of theoretical and empirical work from the 1950s and 1960s such a J.P. Guilford’s broad view of human intelligence, reworked by Howard Gardner; Getzels & Jackson, “Creativity and Intelligence: Explorations with gifted students;” and the legacy of E. Paul Torrence who developed still-in-use tests of creativity translated into 36 languages and being studied for cultural bias. More at http://www.coe.uga.edu/events/major/ttct-figural
Here is a little-known back story on the fate of talk about “creativity” in the midst of the roll-out of the CCSS and the desire of Achieve and the Council of Chief State School Officers to bury this concept (along with other phrases popularized by tech-lobbyist Ken Kay under the banner of 21st Century Skills.)
In July, 2010, Newsweek featured a report called “The Creativity Crisis,” citing a steady decline in scores on the Torrance Tests of Creativity since 1990. The tests have been respected and widely used, in part, because data has been kept on multifaceted accomplishments of each cohort of test takers since the late 1950s. A secondary analysis of the longitudinal data indicated that lifetime creative accomplishment (patents, publications, awards and other indicators) is more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than for traditional childhood measures of intelligence.
In response to inquiries, the CCSSO issued a press release that dismissed the Torrance tests and referred its own work on creativity. This work included a program of individualized instruction via computers (a stretch); some activities in the Arts Education Partnership (not relevant); and EdSteps, the latter described as a project to help “advance creativity to the highest possible international standards, and measure creativity in a way that is situated in a context of actual activity.”
EdSteps is a web-based standard setting and assessment project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is operated by the CCSSO. Although the Common Core State Standards are separate from EdSteps, the CCSSO says the two initiatives complement one another. “EdSteps was created to find new ways to assess vital skills—those that contribute to college and career readiness—that are not currently assessed on a broad scale for reasons of difficulty and cost.”
“EdSteps defines creativity as the valued uses and outcomes of originality driven by imagination, invention, and curiosity.” In order to create a novice-to-expert scale for creativity, EdSteps started soliciting work for an online data bank. ….”from students in early childhood and elementary, middle, high school and from college and graduate students; from individuals in the workplace; from teachers of all subject areas; for any audience or purpose, both within the United States and globally; in any form, genre, or media. Creativity samples can include anything – writing, videos, images, charts, or other graphics – in any subject area.”
Anyone can submit work through EdSteps’ website. The submitter must agree to give up all rights to the work, and permit EdSteps to alter, edit, and otherwise modify the work for its purposes. That freedom of action may be a concern to persons in the arts who think that the integrity of a performance is in the whole work, not a snippet.
I was unable to determine how the proposed scale will address the fact that, in some arts, novice performances by children and untutored adults are sometimes judged more original and imaginative than expert performances by well-trained adults (e.g., a quote attributed to Picasso: ”It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”). Nor was I able to determine whether EdSteps assumes that a single scale of creative achievement can be constructed from the heterogeneous samples of work.
The process of constructing the scale is fairly technical, but it relies on comparing two works and deciding which of the two is the most “effective,” The paired comparisons are carried out in multiple iterations, by multiple judges, with multiple samples. Submissions are coded to permit analyses based on factors such as age, gender, ability level, geographic region, type of work, and the like. In theory, a scale representing a progression of achievement from novice to expert can be constructed without the need for written criteria or explanations, “although these may be added.”
This all sounds like a crock to me, perhaps because I had more than one conversation with Torrence as a young scholar and, as a worker in arts education, have relied on his vocabulary—fluency, flexibility, elaboration, humor, elaboration, and the like—to teach others that some qualities of creative thinking are not entirely a mystery.
Gates paid for some high profile talent to consult on EdSteps, including Howard Gardner. I can’t imagine that they endorced what the website has become.
Judge for yourself. Samples of work and the rest are posted on the glitchy EdSteps website.
Laura, your posts continually amaze me! There is such a breadth to your interests that I learn something (ofttimes something nefarious) each time. Thank you.
Thanks for this excellent post, Laura! Amazing!
Definitely a TAGO!
I needed grit to get through the boring stuff, often the basics of a subject or the harder elements which required a lot of effort.
My creative efforts often had to be set aside, since if my answers were too far from the norm they received a lower grade.
Thus creativity was a passion just for myself during my school days. No grit required, just Joy.
And even as a teacher, my creative lessons were often looked down upon by administrators. Being too far out of the box was not a plus. However, the responses of students and teachers were the only grit I needed to continue my endeavors.
I suppose continuing to do your best when unsupported and under appreciated is a type of grit, but I call it self actualization.
The problematic nature of all social science research is epitomized in articles promoting and critiquing correlations between mythical human traits—grit—and equally mythical statistical concepts, like standardized achievement scores.
The “grit” that I needed today to survive an afternoon of being professionally developed came in the form of a vodka tonic afterwards.
Perseverance shuts down creativity. Striving to to achieve perfection is the exact opposite of creativity. When an artist is in a creative mode they are flowing openly without judgement. Creative ideas often come to artists or engineers when they are not persevering to solve a problem. That’s why both will often keep a notebook handy so they can write down the idea when it pops up from their subconscious. An engineer once told me that the answer to a problem he had been pondering for months came to him out of the blue after he fell asleep. Paul McCartney heard the melody for “Yesterday” in a dream. Perseverance is needed to develop technique, edit, and polish creative ideas and it can be helpful for artists to be able to separate creative mode from editing mode in the artistic process.
Exactly.
Creativity is mostly a remixing of the knowledge that’s in your brain. Ergo you need the time and disposition to remix. But most of all, you need a big repository of knowledge on tap in your brain on which to draw. Doubt me? Think of a creative chef. Can she exist without millions of bits of data IN HER LONG-TERM MEMORY banks about previous meals, about thousands of ingredients, about thousands of recipies tried and failed, about techniques and rules? Suppose she dispensed with all that building of memory banks and decided to just Google most of that knowledge on an as-needed basis –in order to free up more mental bandwidth for “higher order creative thinking”. She’d be paralyzed; a failure. I think it was James Joyce who said “Imagination is memory”. Trying to imagine a great meal, the creative chef plies her memory banks. Conventional wisdom about creativity tends to be totally wrong.
Ponderosa:
I understand your point, but yes, I doubt you. Humans are born creative. Not a lot of knowledge necessary. A toddler with a stick at the beach can draw in the sand.
You write, “Suppose she dispensed with all that building of memory banks and decided to just Google most of that knowledge on an as-needed basis –in order to free up more mental bandwidth for “higher order creative thinking”. She’d be paralyzed; a failure.”
For me, this kind of overwrought argument misses the mark. Suppose she dispensed with all that knowledge building? Then she wouldn’t be a chef, would she? Let alone a creative one. The logic doesn’t hold up.
Randall,
When I see my seventh graders being creative, what I notice is that they are almost always expressing (or “regurgitating” to use the fashionable pejorative term for this act) swatches of input from TV and movies that they’ve imbibed. Styles of humor and acting and dancing and singing they’ve seen, sensibilities, funny phrases, etc. This stuff has become part of their memory banks and its residency there seems essential to their own creative acts. They didn’t create this stuff; they memorized it. It’s no coincidence that they act like American TV stars and not, say, Chinese ones –their behavior is not a function of something intrinsic; it’s the function of something that was poured into their brain by consuming American media. They mix all this with the history knowledge that I have fed them as well as other prior knowledge they have to create interesting skits, songs and comics. OK, maybe all humans are born creative, but the scope of their creativity is limited to what they know. A person who’s never listened to music is not going to be as creative a musician as one who has spent years ingesting an ecclectic array of LPs. The South Park guys would be less creative if they hadn’t imbibed the history lesson where they learned about Mongols attacking the Great Wall of China, an element of one of their episodes that one of my students told me about during our lesson on the Mongols. I’ll bet there are few GENERALLY creative people who do not have a strong GENERAL knowledge base. And few discipline-specific creative people who do not have a super-deep discipline-specific knowledge base. Knowledge may not be sufficient for creativity, but don’t you think it’s necessary?
Can’t creativity be manipulating the known world to see life in a new way?
I see it in literature all the time. The Hunger Games had components of Jackson’s The Lottery and Lowry’s The Giver, plus bits of pieces of other fantasy stories, yet it was a unique and enjoyable work of art.
And even if a child’s idea isn’t totally original, it’s new to them.
Finally, If you’ve ever experienced the results of an elementary/middle school Invention Convention, you know what the expression “mind blown” means. Talk about creativity.
“They didn’t create this stuff; they memorized it.”
Then that wouldn’t be creative, would it?
Anyway, I think I understand what you’re saying, but I’d say creativity comes more from experience than knowledge. Your chef isn’t creative because she’s spent 10,000 hours reading about spices and vegetables and recipes. She’s creative because she’s tried all those spices and vegetables and followed recipes and tweaked recipes here and there until she eventually developed her own.
Probably every parent has had the experience of a child in a high chair dropping food, utensils, etc. over the side. If one gets past one’s parental annoyance, it becomes obvious that the child is actually experimenting creatively. The child will drop different things in different ways from different heights with differing amounts of force. From that he acquires a great deal of knowledge about gravity and physics. Creativity proceeds the knowledge, which such knowledge generates further creativity.
Ponderosa:
Of course knowledge is important for creativity, but there are so many varieties of creativity, and so many varieties of knowledge for that matter, that it’s hard to make sense about either when you have a pedagogical axe to grind. Creativity is an expansive realm. I don’t think it needs to be reduced down to fit any given person’s idea of what and how students should be taught. Which sounds like what you’re doing.
You write, “I’ll bet there are few GENERALLY creative people who do not have a strong GENERAL knowledge base. And few discipline-specific creative people who do not have a super-deep discipline-specific knowledge base.”
How do you know that? And what do you mean by “generally”? My bet is that there are plenty of “generally” unschooled people in this world who exercise creativity on a daily basis, some of them because their survival depends on it.
You don’t have to be an artist or entrepreneur to be creative, but for anyone who wants to be I would recommend The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield.
For got who said it but here it is “creativity favors the prepared mind.”
True perseverance arises from love and trust.
Measuring whether something is related to creativity would seem to require measuring creativity. Maybe there could be a follow up study showing that this study’s measurement of creativity has no relation to creativity.
Sometimes, FLERP!, you hit it out of the park.
To ask children in situations that many would crumple under, to demonstrate more grit is unkind, inhumane and just wrong. Pity on the souls of those pushing this grit nonsense or do they have a soul ? Quit preaching grit and then reread your new testament and do a close reading while you are at it.
I think we have become a nation OBSESSED with studies for just about everything. And if someone’s “study” is PR blitzed by the right PR firm or esteemed organization, it reaches “demagoguery” status and voila. It is SO TIME to stop trying to standardize EVERYTHING as if humanity can be run like a Ford assembly line! Why are people so quick to separate creativity from academics as if creativity is divorced from what goes on in academia? It seems akin to separating the “physical” brain from the “mind” – they go hand in hand.
The way the word “grit” is being misused by education reformers simply turns that word into s_ _ t. (Figure it out–I know Diane doesn’t like swearing here.) Or, perhaps, it can be viewed as the word/food “grits”…as in mush.
The ed reformers have had a negative influence on other terms. Remember last century, when the word “rigor” wasn’t a loaded term?
Diane–I thought you would be interested in this article and change.org petition out of Framingham, MA but I wasn’t sure how to contact you other than through the comments here. Students are banding together against the increasing amount of stress they feel in middle and high school. http://patch.com/massachusetts/framingham/students-create-petition-asking-framingham-high-reduce-their-stress-0#comments
Go to dianeravitch.com and you will be able to contact Diane via email.