Examining Mindset and Grit in Concurrent and Future Reading Comprehension: A Twin Study

Noncognitive factors have gained attention in recent years as potential intervention targets for academic achievement improvement in students. Two notable facets, intelligence mindset and grit, have been of particular interest. Both have been shown to consistently improve educational outcomes, although little work has focused on reading ability. As such, we examined the relation between both grit and mindset on current, future, and change in reading comprehension ability in a twin sample. We used data from 422 twin pairs (171 monozygotic pairs, 251 dizygotic pairs) drawn from the Florida Twin Project on Reading, Behavior and Environment (Taylor et al., 2019). The racial composition of the sample included 1.00% American Indian or Alaska Native, 2.25% Asian, 13.25% Black or African American, 22.63% Hispanic, 1.00% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, 56.13% White, and 3.75% more than 1 race. The household income of the sample at time 1 was 16.15% below $25,000, 18.06% $25,000–49,999, 36.34% $50,000–99,999, and 29.45% $100,000 or more and closely align with the overall composition reported for the state of Florida (United States Census Bureau, 2021). Twins were on average 13 years old when the questionnaire and first reading ability measure were collected, and on average 15 years old when the second reading ability measure was collected. Weak and moderate positive correlations were found between both mindset and grit and with each reading ability score and neither were significantly related to change in reading ability. Twin modeling suggested little to no common genetic or environmental influences between mindset and grit to reading ability. In total, our results do not lend support to the notion of mindset or grit being a mechanism of change for reading ability.