Beth A Myers

Grit and first-year retention in engineering

Recently “grit” has been defined by psychologists as a personal attribute that correlates with persistence through difficulties. We present our preliminary findings on grit and engineering students in this work-in-progress paper. We administered the Grit Scale in a first-year engineering design project course in a large public university in Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 (n = 475). Using binary logistic regression, we showed that grit alone was not a significant predictor of retention in engineering. For future work, we will include two-year retention data and also consider moderating variables such as gender and ethnicity to determine whether their interaction with grit tells a different story. If the moderating variables reveal that grit is more important in retaining students with certain attributes, the Grit Scale may be useful in identifying at-risk students. If not, however, we will need to reconsider the Grit Scale when it is applied to engineering students.