One cannot obtain advanced academic credentials without a degree of sustained cognitive effort over long and unstructured periods. Yet conventional pedagogy is built on the mistaken notion that persistence is the sole province of an individual’s intellectual endowment or fleeting motivation. The upshot for higher education has been environments ill-suited to foster the kind of behavioral endurance needed for the upper-division transition, with attrition figures to show for it. Faced with an onerous cognitive load and no means of structured perseverance, students will often resort to maladaptive forms of avoidance.
In order to put an end to such a pedagogical shortcoming, educational psychologists have been quick to formalize their Structured Behavioral Persistence (SBP) frameworks. Under this paradigm, any claim to enduring academic success is predicated on the deliberate development of task resilience, goal calibration and the ability to defer gratification. Our mixed-methods study was designed to put these SBP strategies to the test and see what effect they have on the graduation velocity and cognitive stamina of undergraduates. We drew on a stratified random sample of 850 students from Europe and North America for our quantitative work, achieving an 88.5 per cent response rate; multiple imputations by chained equations (MICE) was employed to handle missing variables in keeping with the strictures of DOAJ and COPE. The qualitative arm of the project entailed 60 semi-structured interviews with those in academic retention, where we used constructivist grounded theory to chart the resistance institutions put up to the teaching of formal grit.
Our hierarchical regression models turned up a highly significant link (Cohen’s d = 0.95, p < 0.001) between early adoption of SBP and one’s chances of making it through college. What the data makes clear is that to put a student in your institution without some form of structural support for his or her behavioral persistence is to court risk; academic endurance has to be made a requirement of the pedagogy.