The psychological concept of grit focuses uniquely on persistence in attempting to achieve long term goals. Solving problems on tests are short term goals, not long term goals. Grit would be useful in predicting who will complete their degree, not who will find an effective strategy on a test.

To David:

But won't it be rational to conceive that success with accomplishing short-term goals (e.g., acing tough exams) are correlated with success with accomplishing long-term goals (e.g., getting into medical grad school and becoming a specialist). So what makes the Grit scale good at predicting the long-term, broader aspects of succeeding rather than at predicting a short-term, finer aspects of succeeding (i.e., effective strategy use to completing a task quickly in order to ensure better long-term rewards). Will appreciate it if you could give me show me some relevant papers, if any, that can resolve my concerns.

JZ

Dear Jimmy and David

Like David, I think that Grit scale is especially suitable for accessing one's persistence in attempting to achieve long-term goals. This seems to be case when students want, as Jimmy recognize, to get into medical grad school and become a specialist, not to get goods marks in a near exam's situation. More to the point, as you say, it is  more than natural to think that success with accomplishing short-term goals (e.g., acing through exams) is positively correlated to success with accomplishing long-term goals (e.g., to get a Ph D degree in the following 4 years or so). Bandura's work shows us that we are more entitled to achieve long-term goals when we, say, divided them into a set of short-terms goals. This finding testifies on the behalf of your idea that it is rational to conceive that success with accomplishing short-term goals (e.g., acting through exams) correlates positively with success with accomplishing long-term goals (e.g., getting into medical grad school and becoming a specialist).

As I see it, the Grit scale also allows us to get an idea of one's ability to delay gratification. Needless to say, in our every-day lives us are almost always waiting for distant outcomes, rewards and gratifications. Because young children don't have, say, a time perspective, they are not capable, for example, of understanding that today, tomorrow was yesterday, they have tittle ability to delay gratification, 

Accordingly, the Grit scale seems to be an appropriate tool to assess people's capacity for achieving long-terms goals. For me, the main problem of the Grit scale is that it is a five points Likert-like scale. Although five points Likert-like scales are often used in empirical research, it should be noted that there is accumulated evidence that shows that people have a inclination to choose the middle point, three  in the Grit scale.   

I think that through a simple NET search, you will find relevant papers on the topic at hand.

Cheers, OL

Orlando, I've done some searches on my question online and I cannot get any papers that answered my query. That's why I'm putting this question here. The problem with the Grit scale, apart from the small range of ratings, is that many items seem to be semantically identical, and I don't see it hard to self-assign high ratings of '5' on each item for a person with a decent level of self-respect. I would award myself an average of '5' and I would find it quite ridiculous that anyone would want to self-assign average ratings that are below '3'. It's not a matter of simple honesty when doing this scale, but also a question how much self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-respect you award to yourself.

Jimmy, I truly sorry, but I cannot refer to specific papers that address your problem. I can easily follow your considerations related to the Grit scale. Most of the time, however, I am not much satisfied with psychological scales, even though RG members are often rightly looking for them. Note that the so called grand theories of psychology (e.g., Piaget's theory of cognitive development; Skinner's theory of learning and operant conditioning; Kohlberg's theory of moral development; Bandura's theory of social learning, and so forth) were built and developed without appealing to scales whatever. Of course, psychological constructs have to be defined and assessed. I am afraid, however, that psychological assessment through scales may give us an illusion of rigor, when this is not clearly the case. Unobtrusive observations of behavior, semi-structured interviews, for example, are often preferable alternatives to standardized scales and questionnaires.

Dear Orlando, your thoughts ran parallel to mine.

Dear Jimmy

What you say makes me feel good. Thank you and bonne chance for your research.

Cheers, Orlando