Does writing require determination from a student with dyslexia?

Abstract

The new century brought new demands to the educational context and the formation of the active citizen. The current school is gradually moving away from a single focus on knowledge transmission, towards creating a space for sharing and knowledge construction, summoning beyond cognitive skills, emotional and affective skills. There is a need to promote in teachers and, especially, in students, a dynamic mindset that values ​​challenge, self-discipline and the effort to achieve success.
This study, with students from the 7th year of Basic Education at a school in the district of Leiria, inserted in a research-action framework, addresses the role of determination in textual production, and intends to answer the following question: Does the level of effort shown by students with dyslexia reflect positively on their performance in textual production?
All students answered Duckworth’s Grit scale (2016), and questionnaires about their writing, at the beginning and end of the school year (2019-2020). The level of effort invested in carrying out writing was recorded in each weekly writing session, in the Portuguese class.
Considering the scores on the Grit scale, of those six students with dyslexia, one increased the score, two maintained, and three decreased. Despite these results, in the textual production, there was an overall improvement in the different dimensions: orthographic, morphosyntactic and textual structure and progression. We concluded that students showed improved textual performance, even though their grit scores showed no significant increase.