Todd Stanley 
Table of Contents
Motivation comes from one of two places. There is intrinsic, which comes from the self. This essentially means you do something because you find value in it for yourself, not value that someone else has placed on it. If you decide to read a book because you have heard it is good and want to enlighten yourself. This would be intrinsic motivation; you are motivated because you want to read it. The other version is extrinsic, which is motivation from other factors. An example would be your teacher assigning you a book to read under penalty of a bad grade should you not do so. This leads us to an honest conversation about student motivation and grades.
Intrinsic & Extrinsic Student Motivation
Here are some other factors of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation:
| Intrinsic | Extrinsic |
| Deeper purpose | Surface level |
| Loving the process | Focused on the end result |
| About curiosity | About compliance |
| Feeds the soul | Feeds the mouth |
| Based on belonging | Based on competition |
| Failure is a learning experience | Failure is failure |
| Seeing the long term | Seeing only the present |
| Gets pleasure from doing so | Gets rewards from doing so |
| Doing it because you want to | Doing it because you have to |
| Driven from within | Driven externally |
You can see from this list that intrinsic motivation is the better of the two because it has a longer-term impact, and the purpose is deeper. Unfortunately, we live in a society that very much emphasizes extrinsic factors. It is taking a job because it pays more rather than because you find it fulfilling. Similarly, it is posting something on social media not because you want to spread joy or ideas but because you seek likes from others. Another example is doing something not because it is the right thing but because you will get something out of it.
Hyperfixation on Extrinsic Student Motivation
School, in general, has a lot of extrinsic rewards. Here is a list of just some of them:
- Offer of rewards
- Praise
- Incentives
- Extra recess
- Titles
- Classroom responsibilities
- Making the wall of fame/student of the month
- Time out
- Homework pass
- Awards
- Privileges/Prizes
- Stickers/Gold Stars
- Praise
- Reward system
- Respect/ Admiration
- Homework/ Electronics pass
- Choices
- Extra credit
- Guilt
- Praise
- Whole group accountability
- Game-based learning
- Food
As you can see, our schools are rife with extrinsic motivators and the granddaddy of them all grades. We begin giving grades to students at a very young age and continue this until they graduate from college. It is an integral part of our schools and a big reason why they are not working as well as they could be.
Why Are Grades Bad for Student Motivation?
The problem is that not only do grades, an extrinsic motivator, pack a weaker punch, but guess what happens when you take them away? People will no longer do what you have been asking them to do. If you take away the grade students get for reading, they may no longer have the motivation to read.
We have trained students, much like we do dogs, to do something, and you will be rewarded with something. For the dog is a biscuit, and for the student, it is a grade, but make no mistake, there is no difference between these. They are both incentives to get someone to do something.
Daniel Pink talks about this in his book on motivation titled Drive. In it, he espouses the theory that not only can rewards fail to improve people’s engagement, and actually might harm it. He cites research done by psychologists Harry Harlow and Edward Deci in 1971 that indicates this. In a more recent study in 2017 carried out by professors at MIT, they found similar results. What this might look like in school as kids are asked to do work with no grade as they are normally provided with. As a result, students begin to slack off or outright refuse to do the work because there is seemingly nothing in it for them.
Making Learning More Intrinsically Valuable to Students
We need to find a way to make the learning that students do in school be more intrinsic in nature. Teachers need to help them to want to do it not because they get something for it but because they see the value in the learning. One step in that direction is to eliminate grades.
Grades do not always let a student know how they are doing anyway. How many times did you receive an A for average work and a C for something you worked very hard on? Grades are very subjective in nature, with different teachers determining different criteria for receiving them. One teacher might require students to turn in their work, behave, and participate in order to receive an A. Another teacher might base it on the quality of the work. How well is it done? Another teacher might ask does the child go above and beyond what is expected before assigning an A to students.
Grades Do Not Equate to Talent
There is a reason we do not use grades to determine whether a student is gifted or not. There is no consistency to it nor any common criteria. Not only that but not all classes are considered with equal weight. After all, which would seem to be a bigger accomplishment, a student receiving an A in art class or one who received an A in physics? They are both classes found in a high school, and yet they are not considered to be the same.
Even knowing this to be the case about grades, we hang the brunt of our children’s educational achievements on them. What is your GPA? What is your class ranking? Is your grade high enough to pass the class and move on to the next? The answers to these questions in the real world are; who cares, who cares, and does it matter?
An Uphill Climb with Student Motivation
Of course, this is a seemingly impossible task for schools. After all, there are three groups of people who do care about grades; parents, colleges, and teachers. No, I did not leave students out of this group accidentally. The only reason why students care about grades is because of the importance these other three groups place on them. In order to get rid of grades, we would need to educate these other three groups on why they are not important so that they stop putting pressure on students.
You might ask, how are students going to know how they are doing if there are not any grades? The easy answer is feedback. We tell students what they are doing well, what they need to improve, and how to do so. One thing we forget is that grades originally started out as feedback.
What Does A Grade Mean to Students?
A grade lets a student know where they stood in the class and gave them something to compare themselves to. Because this game of striving for the grade rather than the learning began to take place, the grade lost all value. It means very little anymore, but the feedback it provided remains just as important. We just need to figure out a way to provide this feedback so that it has intrinsic meaning to students.
In the past few years, whether teaching a talent development class of 3rd graders or teaching kids from China online, I have not given a single grade. And guess what? Students keep coming to class, students continue to work, and students are learning. I provide lots of ongoing feedback to students, not waiting for a summative grade to find out how they are doing. It is easy to tell what the final product is going to be in most cases from the conversations and interactions I have had with them.
Real World Applicability of Grading & Motivation
When you boil it all down, grades are a lazy way for a teacher to help their students to learn. In the real world, we do not receive grades for mowing the lawn, getting our work at the office completed, or loving our family. We do these things because there is intrinsic value in doing so. If we truly want to be getting students ready for the real world, jettison the grades and nurture their learning much like do with our own children.
After all, no one gave their infant a grade for learning to walk, or a grade for eating their food, or a grade for helping out around the house. Maybe we should treat our students much like we would our own children and stop grading them so much.
Further Reading
- If you want to read an excellent book on the negative aspects of grades, read Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards
- Read the first article in this series on school reform here.
