It’s a Myth: Grades Don’t Motivate Students to Learn

Yep, me too. More times than I can count. Even my students who love reading and writing only do so if there’s a grade involved. It took me a too long to figure out that it’s because students are motivated to EARN POINTS, not to learn and grow as readers and writers. If that’s you too, it’s not your fault! It’s the system we’ve been taught to believe and participate in. The educational system in the United States begins assigning point values to learning as early as 5th grade – and sometimes even earlier. From that time on, students are conditioned to believe that they need to earn points to be successful. Learning is just an occasional byproduct.

 Let’s examine why grades don’t motivate students to learn, and what we as educators can do instead to break the cycle.

Traditional Grading Practices and Motivation

You see, our grading system is based on the theories offered by old-school psychologists like B.F. Skinner. He believed that the most effective motivator for desirable behavior was consequences – either punishment or reward.

Remember in my last post where I mentioned that when percentage grades were introduced, the AVERAGE grade was 50%?

Imagine what would happen if your class averages hovered at 50% today because students were taking risks and making mistakes despite the consequences?  The number of angry student emails about being eligible for sports and parent voicemails about college acceptance would probably send me into the fetal position underneath my desk. 

Here’s the problem. Grades impact way too much about a student’s future for students to want to take risks that could result in a lower GPA. Here is why my students only care about what is worth points and what is for a grade. Because their grades matter too much for them to be sacrificed in the name of learning:

Grades Don’t Motivate Students to Learn, They Motivate Students to Take the Path of Last Resistance.

Would I rather have a  culture of compliance and will-work-for-points or a culture of risk- taking and growth? A place where students do the bare minimum or a  place where students are curious, playful, and inject joy into the work they complete? A class where I have to force students to learn, and keep them on track every day or a class that develops self-regulation and lifelong learning? If I want the latter, I realize that I  have to change the way I grade. I have to stop using grades as rewards and punishment, as bribes to get students to comply.

What New Research Tells Us About Motivation

Research has shown us that relying on tangible expected rewards like grades is harmful to students ( Deci, Ryan, and Koestner 1999 in Feldman 2019) and undermines any kind of intrinsic motivation. In fact, the more students are externally regulated ( i.e. given rewards/ punishments in the form of grades), the less interest and effort they showed, and displayed more negative coping skills. Internally regulated students showed more interest, enjoyment, perceived competence, and positive coping skills ( Ryan and Deci 2000). However, there’s no magic button that turns on intrinsic motivation in students. For one thing, each student has different interests, values, needs, and desires. Our modern understanding of motivation suggests that students grow more intrinsically motivated when:

• Students feel competent, as though they have the necessary skills to succeed
• Students have choices or opportunities to work on tasks that they are curious about or reflect their own interests
• Students feel like they themselves, not their work, are respected and valued by the teacher

(Deci, 1999)

What Should We Do Now That We Know That Grades Don’t Motivate Students?

All of this talk is well and good, but how can we take this knowledge into our classrooms and grading policies?

1. Stop grading behaviors (like turning in assignments late) and penalizing students who forget materials
2. Offer feedback instead of grading practice assignments (like homework). if we want students to take risks, we cannot continue to penalize them for doing so
3. Make connections with our students as humans, not as students of the content we teach
4. Offer multiple opportunities to demonstrate success (i.e. re- writes or re-takes)
5. Scaffold self- regulation – allow students to set their own goals and priorities for certain classes or units
6. Offer student choice for demonstrating mastery that leverage their other skills and interests
7. Consider standards- based grading over traditional grading
8. Grade using rubrics rather than subjective scores
9. Avoid grades for completion/ compliance
10. Evaluate every single grading policy on your syllabus, and justify how it provides an accurate summary of learning based on what you are expected to teach. If it cannot be justified, get rid of it.

References

Feldman, J. (2018). Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1020