Academic Perseverance

Academic perseverance is a student's ability to stay focused on a goal despite obstacles and to forgo distractions to prioritise higher pursuits over lower pleasures.

A second important mindset is academic perseverance. 

Academic perseverance is a student's ability to stay focused on a goal despite obstacles (grit) and to forgo distractions to prioritise higher pursuits over lower pleasures (self-control) (Dweck, Walton, & Cohen, 2011). 

Where motivation is 'getting going',  academic perseverance is about sustaining a student's original motivation to 'keep going'.  Having said this, academic mindset and Academic Perseverance, at times, sit in tension with each other. This is because as educators, we know to motivate is to care, but to foster perseverance, we need to challenge. For this reason, on our model, Academic Perseverance sits apart from Academic Mindsets as the second factor. 

Academic Perseverance is important for two main reasons: it is known as a reliable predictor of a student's academic achievement as well as being an essential component if learner agency. 

Researchers describe Academic Perseverance's contribution to agency as having two components: self-discipline (grit) and self-control. Self-discipline is a student's ability to stay focused on a long term goal despite obstacles. Student's with self-discipline are usually high in self-efficacy because they tend to complete learning tasks. Self-control is the ideal conceptual partner for self-discipline. It is defined as a student's ability to forgo short term distractions to prioritise higher pursuits over lower pleasures. In this way, self-control together with self-disciple helps a student to persevere through challenges in their learning. In turn these factors influence learning behaviours and subsequent expressions of student agency.

More specifically, Academic Perseverance is about effort which is related to a student's quality of academic behaviour (despite obstacles, setbacks, and distractions). Perseverance is also recognised as vital to 'high achievement' (Duckworth et al., 2007) and therefore is seen as a key mindset correlated with academic performance.