How Grit and Resilience Predict Successful Academic Performance

Predicting student success and preventing dropout are crucial efforts for higher education institutions. Many indicators are used to predict retention and performance such as high school GPA, SAT scores, and individual personal factors. Grit and resilience are two such individual factors useful in helping identify characteristics of successful students, although they have sparked much debate. For this longitudinal study, college students’ resilience score from the Effective Life-Long Inventory (ELLI) and the Grit test were used to predict cumulative grade point average. Resilience and Perseverance of Effort (POE), a subscale of the Grit test, were significant in predicting student performance. Efforts to improve retention and performance would benefit from interventions to build resilience and grit to help students be more aware of their strategies and overcome obstacles and thus prevent them from dropping out