Angela Duckworth

Duckworth was born in 1970 to Chinese immigrants.[1] She grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey[2] and graduated from Cherry Hill High School East.[3]

Duckworth earned a B.A. in Neurobiology at Harvard College in 1992.[4] She then graduated from the University of Oxford in 1996 with an M.Sc. in neuroscience on a Marshall Scholarship, and from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 with a Ph.D. in psychology.[5][6] She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013.[6]

Duckworth's first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, was released in May 2016.[7] It stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 21 weeks.[8] A review of the book in The New York Times called Duckworth "the psychologist who has made 'grit' the reigning buzzword in education-policy circles."[9]

Duckworth is best known for her research on grit, a strength she defines as passion and perseverance for long-term goals.[1][10][11] She developed the Grit Scale, a measure of this construct.[11][12]

Duckworth has found grit to be a common factor among the high-achievers she has studied.[11] Her work suggests that grit is unrelated to IQ but is closely related to conscientiousness.[10][11]

Grit has been studied across the lifespan, but Duckworth focuses primarily on how building grit can help adolescents.[7] This falls under the umbrella of character education and the movement to expand school instruction beyond solely cognitive factors. However, meta-analyses have found no evidence that grit is linked to superior performance. Moreover, Duckworth's operationalization of grit has been criticized as a mere renaming of the previously established construct of conscientiousness.[13]

Since the introduction of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, there has been a growing call for effective ways to measure character strengths.[14] Duckworth herself though has encouraged caution when applying and, especially, testing character in classrooms.[15] One reason is that existing measures were designed for scientific purposes, and so as yet there are no reliable ways to measure grit in high-stakes situations, like college admissions or job applications.[16]

Some claim that focusing on grit would lead to the neglect of other important factors, like the positive socio-economic prerequisites necessary to deploy it.[17] Duckworth acknowledges the importance of environmental factors and says that it's not that one matters more than the other but rather that they both matter: "The question is not whether we should concern ourselves with grit or structural barriers to achievement. In the most profound sense, both are important, and more than that, they are intertwined." [18]

• angeladuckworth.com, personal Website
• Angela Duckworth faculty page at University of Pennsylvania
• Angela Duckworth at TED