TeachME Professional Development

1. A growing movement in education is to explore the potential of students 'non-cognitive' factors such as attributes, dispositions, social skills and intrapersonal resources, independent of intellectual ability.

2. Each of the following is an accurate statement about psychological resources that students can develop to promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance EXCEPT:

3. Empirically based mindset interventions include activities that explicitly teach students to have a 'production' mentality that enhances intelligence and provides a way to promote global values and efforts.

4. Parents and guardians can play a direct and important role in promoting their children's grit, tenacity, and perseverance by employing some of the research-based best practices at home as they work with their children around academic goals.

5. Some experts believe that one flaw in our education system is that middle class students are being pushed so hard to get into top-tier universities that their high school years are filled with intense stress and they are not being adequately prepared for a thriving adulthood.

6. Adolescents report that the biggest challenges they face in their lives are concerns about their changing identity, concerns about their own future as they anticipate educational, occupational, and career challenges in an increasingly competitive job market, and:

7. Leadership competencies for the 21st century include adaptability, collaboration, problem-solving, decision-making and innovation.

8. Technological advances are providing a variety of new affordances that can be leveraged to support student's grit, tenacity, and perseverance in several ways, and advantages include:

9. When young people utilize effective learning strategies and demonstrate a positive mindset, that not only helps them drive their own learning to do better in school but also helps them to navigate the typical barriers to success both inside and outside the classroom, and they are building:

10. Academic mindsets, which determine how students frame themselves as learners, include short and long term goals, purpose, character, and will.

11. Socio-cultural context can play a fundamental role in influencing the types of goals students will value, the types of challenges and setbacks they will face, and the resources they will have access to for supporting perseverance.

12. When students have opportunities to work toward goals that are meaningfully connected to their future success, cultural values, lives outside of school, and/or topics that are personally interesting and relevant, they are more likely to persevere when faced with a challenge.

13. Which of the following is NOT a correct statement about how students perceive a sense of belonging in the academic community?

14. While self-control refers to the ability to regulate attention in the face of distractions and to delay gratification, self-discipline involves planning behavior that enhances the ability to reach goals, while knowing how to:

15. To support perseverance in the face of a challenge, a four phase model is recommended that includes stating the task, setting general goals and criteria, engaging in the learning process, and evaluating success and failure in order to establish new goals.

16. As grit becomes a more popular notion in education, there is a risk that poorly informed educators or parents could misuse the idea and exhibit the tendency to overvalue personality-based explanations for observed behaviors and undervalue situational explanations.

17. One of the challenges of measuring grit, perseverance and tenacity is that there is a gap in methods for assessing interpersonal and intrapersonal capabilities since so much focus is placed on:

18. Diagnostic measures designed to identify vulnerable students must be particularly attentive to intended and unintended consequences of using such data, which is known as "discriminant reliability."

19. Self-report items that measure grit and 'perseverance of effort' include each of the following EXCEPT:

20. Informant reports are those made by someone other than the student, and such forms of reporting are a common approach for teachers, parents/guardians, and mental health professionals to access the social-emotional competencies that serve as protective factors associated with resilience in young children.

21. Although educational records may be used to identify students who are not managing to persevere in the face of school challenges, they are only broad indicators of perseverance and do not tell the richer story of an individual's characteristics or how interactions with the learning environment contribute to these outcomes.

22. New methods for measuring behavioral task performance include:

23. Studies have reported functional and structural changes in the brain and improved performance for long term practitioners of mindfulness meditation techniques that enhance attentional focus, which is evidence of the cognitive plasticity and malleability of brain functioning for processes related to grit.

24. Recent literature reviews have consistently demonstrated that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be taught as transferable competencies, with a wide range of programs and approaches showing that informal school environments have the most successful promise.

25. At the preschool and early elementary ages, when children are transitioning to formal schooling, the fundamental psychological resources that are predictive of long-term success have been shown to be executive functions and:

26. Experts have concluded that low self-esteem, trauma, and poor physical health are the most significant factors in the impairment of prefrontal cortex function and inadequate executive functioning.

27. The notion that students are more likely to persist through academic challenges when they believe the effort will make them smarter and lead to success is referred to as:

28. Student Success Skills is a program where students work in groups to improve goal setting and progress monitoring, build a supportive social community, bolster cognitive and memory skills, and deal with pressure and anxiety, and it has been shown to increase reading and math achievement.

29. Leaders in schools with much more diverse student bodies are beginning to recognize that all students benefit from an education that encourages students to strive for success, not fear failure, and persist, and that persistence is more likely in learning environments that are intentionally designed to promote it.

30. Design thinking uses brain storming, imagination, collaboration, prototyping, and feedback in a system where students learn to 'fail early and often' and use evaluation to improve a task.

31. Which of the following is generally NOT one of the settings for informal learning that occurs in and out of school settings?

32. One benefit of digital learning environments is that they can provide information about behavioral task performance, affective responses, and physiological responses that can be used dynamically within a system or provided to teachers to adapt instructional tasks to learner needs, which is known as "meso-level" data.

33. The digital program "Brainology" is an interactive workshop that teaches students about the "growth mindset" as they are given a series of activities to enhance brain growth through effort and practice.

34. Although substantial data are available about the impact of grit, tenacity, and perseverance, it is not possible to isolate the potential impacts of the non-cognitive factors themselves as the interventions are very complex.

35. In order to promote grit, tenacity, perseverance, educational stakeholders need to look to the research base for best practices and programs that are suitable to local control and:

36. Students must initially have the opportunity to take on short term goals that guarantee success before being expected to move on to challenging "high order" goals.

37. Academic mindsets to support perseverance include "I have willpower when I'm distracted," "My long-term goals are the most important," and "I can and must be responsible."

38. A growing body of research indicates that in order to significantly impact strategies in the middle grade levels and higher, time frames for interventions should be:

39. Educators and administrators should evaluate technology with respect to the degree to which its design is grounded in principles aligned with research-based best practices for fostering these competencies.

40. Which of the following is NOT one of the barriers that professionals cite when implementing approaches to promote grit, tenacity and perseverance?

41. One recommended strategy for parents to help their children is to instill a growth mindset through consistently praising effort over ability, which can have important payoffs.

42. Researches, practitioners, and policymakers who are seeking to make progress to promote non-cognitive factors face challenges with clarity when the same term is used to describe different concepts or when different terms are used for the same concept, which is known as:

43. Experts believe that deep consideration must be given to the fact that grit, tenacity, and perseverance will look quite different depending on the nature of the goals students are striving for and the challenges they face.

44. Research indicates that developing grit, tenacity, and perseverance should always be within nonacademic disciplines because within core subjects such as math, science, and language arts, the focus must be on intellectual context.

45. Although there are many programs demonstrating impacts in particular contexts, there is still a gap between the research and how practitioners can use the various intervention approaches effectively across a wide variety of settings for a diversity of students, so further studies are needed in this area.