Grades + Stress +Late nights + Last minute = Learning. Is this equation healthy? Nope.
Systematic studies were performed by educational psychologists in the 1980’s and 90’s to find learning effect of grades. The results showed that grades lessen students’ interest, they make students take less intellectual risks on assignments, and they also cause students to think less intelligently. Students in a “grade-oriented environment” are also more likely to cheat and more likely to fear failure.
So what would a schooling system have to change in order to effectively build students?
Here are a few key things that need to be modified to make a grade-less system beneficial and actually superior to a grade-oriented system.
First is incentive: the desire for students to learn for their own sake. If grades are what encourage students to learn, then that is problematic. Students should not be motivated by rewards and punishments that will eventually make them less interested in the learning itself and more focused on the grades.
Second is accomplishment: the more students concentrate on how much they accomplish or how well they are doing, the less they are engaged with what they’re actually doing. Students become so concerned with what they achieve or accomplish that they only think about what they’re getting and not what they’re learning. So the question among educators is whether grades correctly portray student performance.
Third is quantification: there is value in assessing the quality of learning/teaching but it is not always necessary or possible to measure. Grading in a scale of point may assess a student on what they did wrong but it often misses much of what is going on and may change what is going on for the worse.
Fourth is curriculum: the goals of learning that organize your assessments. A portfolio is one solution that can be productive in the replacement of grades. They give a way to gather an array of expressive illustrations of learning for student revision.
Although research on grading and learning has slowed down since the 90’s, tests that have been performed recently show the same results. I think that this topic of research is particularly important because grades are effecting almost 100% of American youth and obviously a lot more young people around the world. If grades are harmful for learning than action should be taken. First, however, a grade-less system should be created and tested in different countries among a large variety of students. This way, scientists or researchers can check for third variables and see if the hypothesis that grades are bad for learning is without error. Another way they could potentially test this is by hiding grades from students in a grade-oriented system. Then the researchers could compare the results of the students who cannot see their grades to the students who can, and check regularly.
http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/howto/basics/grading-assessment.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tcag.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jen-rubino/grades-vs-learning_b_2525903.html
