This paper examines whether school characteristics moderate the association between grit and reading achievement in a sample of Grade 6 learners in high-poverty contexts. The analysis makes use of data from 2383 learners distributed across 60 township and rural schools in three provinces of South Africa. Indicators of school functionality are used to split the sample of schools into three groups (low, medium, and high functionality) and separate models of reading achievement are estimated for each group. The econometric analysis points to evidence of variation in the association between grit and reading achievement by school functionality, with a stronger association estimated for learners in more functional schools. The major contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, this paper is one of only a handful of studies that estimate the relationship between grit and academic achievement in a middle-income country, and the first to estimate this relationship among primary school students in an African context. Second, the results provide empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that school characteristics interact with non-cognitive skills to produce learning outcomes, a relationship that has received scant attention in the literature to date.

本文研究了在贫困的情况下，六年级学习者样本中学校特征是否调节了毅力和阅读成绩之间的联系。该分析利用了来自南非三个省的60所乡镇和乡村学校的2383名学习者的数据。学校功能指标用于将学校样本分为三组（低，中和高功能），并为每组估计单独的阅读成绩模型。计量经济学分析表明，沙丁鱼和阅读成绩之间的关联因学校的功能而异，对于功能更强的学校中的学习者而言，关联性更高。本文的主要贡献如下：首先，本文是少数在中等收入国家中估计毅力与学业成绩之间关系的研究之一，并且是第一个在非洲背景下估计小学生之间这种关系的研究。第二，研究结果提供了经验证据，支持了以下假设：学校特征与非认知技能相互作用以产生学习成果，这一关系迄今为止在文献中很少受到关注。