Academic Success Skills: Productive Struggle, Persistence, and Perseverance

Persistence and perseverance, and the productive struggle they enable, are often considered traits that some students possess, rather than behaviors that emerge from a variety of subjective appraisals students make in the context of particular situations. Productive struggle, perseverance, and perseverance involve a complex interplay between mathematical tasks, mathematics as an intellectual pursuit, and the goals, beliefs, interests, and resources students bring to the learning environment. It is a goal of entry level mathematics instruction to engage students in productive struggle and to foster the persistence and perseverance that engaging in genuine mathematical inquiry requires.

Faculty at the MIP Academic Success Skills Initiation Workshop in May, 2019 recommended that instructional resources developed by CoRDs and ARCs addressing Productive Struggle, Persistence, and Perseverance for success in the Oklahoma entry-level college math pathways should:

1. Propose a conceptualization of productive struggle that makes explicit the environmental, affective, and cognitive conditions that need to be satisfied to engage in it.

2. Specify the relationship between productive struggle, persistence, and perseverance, and students’ goals, mindsets, identities, and beliefs.

3. Propose specific principles of curriculum design and instructional practice (including assessment practice) that can promote students’ productive struggle and foster their persistence and perseverance.

4. Describe the potential affordances of the MIP focus on promoting students’ active engagement and leveraging meaningful applications for promoting students’ productive struggle and fostering their persistence and perseverance.

Suggested Resources

Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L. (1988). A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality. Psychological review, 95(2), 256.

This foundational study provides an empirical and theoretical interpretation of motivational factors leading to student behavior of persistence or avoidance. Most critically, even highperforming students are susceptible to unproductive strategies if they have counterproductive views about the nature of their ability and the learning situation. This resource is most relevant to addressing foci (1) and (2) above.

Kapur, M., & Bielaczyc, K. (2012). Designing for productive failure. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 21(1), 45-83.

Kapur and Bielaczyc propose several principles for supporting students’ engagement in productive failure. They also present the results of an empirical study that compared learning outcomes from students who experienced one of two treatments: (1) instruction that promoted productive failure and (2) students who experienced direct instruction. The authors describe the affordances of engaging in productive failure for students’ development of problem-solving skills and strategies. This resource is most relevant to addressing foci (1), (2), and (3) above.

Pasquale, M. (2016). Productive Struggle in Mathematics. Interactive STEM Research + Practice Brief. Education Development Center, Inc.

In this brief report, Pasquale identifies various factors that promote students’ productive struggle in mathematics and shares examples of how teachers might respond to students’ struggles to enhance their learning. This resource is most relevant to addressing focus (3) above.

Middleton, J. A., Tallman, M., Hatfield, N., & Davis, O. (2014). Taking the severe out of perseverance: Strategies for building mathematical determination. In N. Alpert (Ed.), The collected papers. Chicago, IL: Spencer Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.spencer.org/collected-papers-april-2015

Middleton et al. define perseverance as a behavior that emerges from a variety of subjective appraisals that students make in the context of particular situations. These authors review research on students’ development of interests and efficacy, academic goals, and their academic and social identities, and discuss key strategies for helping teachers engage students in experiences whereby they are able to assist students in developing persistent and adaptive mathematical dispositions. This resource is most relevant to addressing foci (2), (3), and (4) above.