If you’ve followed education in the news or at the book store in the past couple of years, chances are you’ve heard of “grit.” It’s often defined as the ability to persevere when times get tough, or to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal.

Alongside growth mindset and self-control, grit is on a short list of not-strictly-academic skills, habits and qualities that researchers have deemed essential.

And that research has quickly made its way into the hands of educational leaders eager to impose accountability measures that can go farther than standardized math and reading tests. They want to capture how schools are doing in cultivating the full range of qualities necessary for students to succeed.

But now Angela Duckworth, the scientist most closely associated with the concept of “grit,” is trying to put on the brakes. In a new paper published in the journal Educational Researcher, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist, and her colleague David Scott Yeager at the University of Texas at Austin, argue that grit isn’t ready for prime time, if prime time means high-stakes tests.

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