Sunday, August 02, 2009

True Grit

This article by Jonah Lehrer in today's Boston Globe really rang true for me. It discusses recent research by psychologists into the phenomenon of grit. "[T]he researchers are quick to point out that grit isn't simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it's about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It's always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going." Unlike IQ, grit is difficult to measure, but researcher Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania has devised a survey to measure it. Here is the link to the survey. "The initial evidence suggests that measurements of grit can often be just as predictive of success, if not more, than measurements of intelligence. For instance, in a 2007 study of 175 finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that her simple grit survey was better at predicting whether or not a child would make the final round than an IQ score."

As someone who has spent most of her professional life in academia, I find this study to be fascinating. We have all worked with students who came in with mediocre LSAT scores and GPAs who ended up at the top of their law school classes, as well as with students who had strong predictors of success but didn't excel at law school. To me, the difference between the two groups of students sometimes boils down to a singlemindedness about becoming a lawyer. Some students become discouraged and disengage if they don't do well on their first-semester exams. Others, who have equally disappointing results, seek out their advisers, avail themselves of academic support, apply themselves, and do better in each consecutive semester. It is hard to predict into which group a particular student will fall, but the students in the latter group tend to be those for whom law school is the fulfillment of a long-held dream. Another trait that I have seen as important for success in law school and in life is resilience, but that isn't mentioned in the Globe article. The question of resilience following trauma was the subject of an excellent 2006 article in the New York Times Magazine.

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