Research for Grit Levels of Prospective Teachers in terms of Some Variables

Abstract

The meaning of the grit in TDK is determination of defeating obstacles in a job. While Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly (2007) clarified the grit, they said “the grit is determination on longtime goals and desire level”. And the also emphasized the grit’s importance in success and intelligence measurement. Even Duckworth and Quinn (2009) defended that the grit as explanatory of academic success is more effective than intelligence grade. There are studies defending the grit’s relation with self-arrangement, self-discipline and goal tendency and the grit’s importance in explaining these concepts (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009; Peterson & Seligman, 2004). In this research the relation between prospective teachers’ successes and grits are examined according to gender and age factors. In this research descriptive survey model was used aiming to put forward the relation between success and grit. In 2015-2016 Education Year Spring Term in NEU Education Faculty 270 last class students in different departments participated in this research. As a tool to collect data, the Grit Scale developed by Duchworth and Quinn and adapted to Turkish by Sarıçam et al. (2015) was used. In this research frequency, mean, standard deviation and nonparametric statistic techniques were used to analyze the data. Mann-Whitney-U and Kruskal-Wallis tests are applied to determine whether there was a meaningful difference among the opinions of the students according to gender and success factors. The data gathered as a result of measurements during research was done in computer by SPSS software. It is seen that the grit point means of Education faculty last class students are in intermediate level, the girls’, the 25+ ages’ and the German department students’ grit point means are higher than other groups’ grit point means. When looked at the difference between the experimental and the control groups, it was seen that the students in the experimental group had more achievement scores compared to the students in the control group. The experimental method adopted created significance in favor of the experimental group.