Challenging Myself and the System

I didn't "grade" for a full unit and here is what happened (Part 2) Today was an awesome day. I was nervous to see how my students would do on their summative assessment on our Developmental Unit. I had not "graded" anything, but I had given feedback on their formative assessments and they self-assessed continually. Students Initial Concerns/Comments - Why would I do anything if you don't grade it? - I am not going to try now - This is stupid - Go back to the way we always did it - This is too hard and a waste of my time - Wait, so I decide how I am scored? Can't I lie? - How do I get points?! - This is great, I get to pick what I can do Many of these questions I was able to answer by discussing the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. I also referenced the fact that I did not "grade" any of their in-class work throughout the year, but they still worked diligently on that (I am lucky and have some ...

Grades: What do they really motivate? Recently, in my psychology class, we looked at what motivates us and how these specific types of motivation affect the way we perceive these situations in the future. Our focus was around intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and we even had a brief discussion of motivating teachers using monetary rewards based on test scores (at first they were all in...then they found all of the flaws with this system). Here is a brief snippet of a meta-analytic review out of Rochester University ( Deci, Ryan, Koestner, 1990 ) (or the  Harvard Business Review that we looked at, Chamorro-Premuzic ) " More specifically, for every standard deviation increase in reward, intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks  decreases  by about 25%. When rewards are tangible and foreseeable (if subjects know in advance how much extra money they will receive) intrinsic motivation decreases by 36%."  In other words, when we expect an extrinsic motivation, o...