COLLEGE PARK, MD (March, 2016) Among education leaders across the nation, concern has been steadily shifting from the overall lack of participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses to the issue of underrepresentation. Plainly put, women and certain minority groups, such as African Americans, are still relatively scarce in engineering and some science fields, despite years of efforts to increase their participation. As researchers try to determine why some students are more likely to pursue STEM, they have increasingly focused on the motivational and self-regulatory factors that have been shown to impact students educational and occupational choices.
One such factor is “grit,” defined by psychologist Angela Duckworth, who originated the construct, as one's perseverance and passion in the pursuit of long-term, challenging goals. Grit has become a popular topic in the scientific community and in the media, where it is frequently argued that researchers and practitioners need to design grit-based interventions to enhance students’ STEM achievement. But the fact of the matter is that grit's validity as a psychological construct, especially in relation to conceptually similar motivational and self-regulatory constructs, has not been systematically explored.
Does grit matter as much to different kinds of achievement as many people seem to think? What is the potential of grit for understanding diverse individuals’ involvement in STEM activities in school and beyond?
To answer these questions, the National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $1.2 million grant to Drs. Allan Wigfield (PI) and Ji Seung Yang (co-PI) of the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. Their project, entitled “An Examination of Grit in Relation to Diverse High School Students' STEM Motivation, Self-Regulation, and Outcomes," will be a longitudinal validation study, assessing grit's convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity as well as gender and ethnic differences over time.
Drs. Wigfield and Yang plan to conduct their study with an ethnically and economically diverse sample of middle and high school students. These students will be surveyed twice in 8th grade and once in 9th grade. Their levels of grit and other motivation, self-regulation, and personality variables will be measured. Information about students' choices to take STEM courses, their grades in those courses, and their anticipated major in college will also be collected.
The project will be transformative in its use of sophisticated analysis strategies such as item response theory and other latent variable modeling procedures. With these groundbreaking strategies in hand, Drs. Wigfield and Yang hope to parse out grit's uniqueness from other motivational and self-regulatory constructs with clear relations to STEM outcomes.
Doing so will help establish grit as a construct in itself, enabling and informing grit-based interventions that might make all the difference in whether students – and which students – seek a future in science and technology.
Dr. Allan Wigfield is a professor of educational psychology in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. His research interests concern the development of children’s achievement motivation, children’s motivation for reading and how it is influenced by different reading instructional practices, and gender differences in achievement motivation. He earned his Ph.D. in educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is on the honorary faculty of psychology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher by the University of Maryland in 2002, Dr. Wigfield directs the graduate program in Human Development as well as the Motivation in Education Research Group (MERG).
Dr. Ji Seung Yang is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology’s Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation (EDMS) program. Before joining the EDMS faculty in the fall of 2013, Dr. Yang was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she received her Ph.D. in Advanced Quantitative Methods in Educational Research.
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