Putting the Goal Back into Grit: Academic Goal Commitment, Grit, and Academic Achievement
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EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Putting the Goal Back into Grit: Academic Goal Commitment, Grit, and Academic Achievement Xin Tang
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Ming-Te Wang2 Filomena Parada1 Katariina Salmela-Aro1 ●
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Received: 18 July 2020 / Accepted: 26 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Grit has recently been challenged for its weak predictive power and the incompleteness of its measurement. This study addressed these issues by taking a developmental, person-oriented approach to study academic-related goal commitment and grit and their effects on academic achievement. Using longitudinal data among Finnish eighth and ninth graders (n = 549, 59.4% female, age = 14–16), the longitudinal changes in grit and academic goal commitment profiles were investigated through latent profile and latent transition analyses. Four profiles were identified across two grades: High committedpersistent and moderate consistency (~17%), Moderate (~60%), Low committed-persistent and moderate-low consistency (~8%) and Extremely low committed-persistent and moderate-low consistency (~12%). The students in the High committedpersistent and moderate consistency profile had the highest academic achievement of all the profiles when controlled for gender, socioeconomic status, conscientiousness, and academic persistence. The results revealed that students’ profiles changed between the eighth and ninth grades, with more than one-third of the High committed-persistent and moderate consistency adolescents dropping from this group. Further analysis showed that the profiles varied by educational aspiration, gender, and socioeconomic status. These findings imply that the combination of grit and academic goal commitment influences academic achievement; however, this combination is less common, unstable, and affected by internal and external factors. The study provided important implications on the weak grit effect and the ways to improve it. Keywords
Grit Goal commitment Achievement Goal Perseverance ●
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Introduction Defined as the trait of passion and perseverance for long-term goals, the concept of grit has received a great deal of attention and examination in the academic literature due to its role in performance (Duckworth et al. 2007). However, there has been increasing criticism of its construct and predictive validity. For instance, grit only shares weak association with
Supplementary information The online version of this article (https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01348-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Xin Tang xin.tang@helsinki.fi 1
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achievement, a relation that weakens when accounting for conscientiousness or self-control (Credé 2018; Credé et al. 2017). Moreover, scholars have noted issues regarding the alignment between the concept of grit and how it is measured (Credé 2018). For instance, although goals have been defined as a central component of grit, grit scales have rarely addressed them. Finally, the developmental characteristics of samples or goals may add complexity to identi
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