Grades: What do they really motivate? (part 1)
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, our intrinsic motivation decreases.
The idea of points and using them to motivate students has been something that has always reminded me of this story. A friend of mine who teaches middle school would send me snapchats almost every night of massive papers to grade. I would regularly ask her, "why are you grading so much?" Her response, "they will not do anything unless I grade it." I looked at her students, who albeit younger, were not much different than mine. The difference was, I did not grade everything they did, just select things that demonstrated their understanding. I leveraged peer-to-peer feedback and technology in order to provide feedback to students whenever possible to keep me sane. This is why I truly believe that motivation is cultural and created by schools and teachers.
Without going into detail too much, my motivation for finally attempting to go "gradeless" was based around the fact that I was giving retakes to a massive number of students who did not put in work the first time, or the second, and ended up doing no better and leaving me feeling like "I am caring more than the kids." I decided I had one option, I had to flip the script on my students and have them "own their own learning."
This last unit I went "gradeless" and I had unbelievable results that I am excited to share out in my next post.
Looking forward to hearing about it. I have tried intrinsic "purpose driven" units after my motivation unit in which there were no grades, the students chose what to learn, how to learn it, and how they would measure how much they learned...but the novelty wore off as they had too many other classes with work they were being held accountable for. As a result, they liked the idea of learning for intrinsic reasons but the cultural constraints proved to big of a hurdle. After failing with this, I haven't done it in a few years and am thinking I would like to come back to it. Awesome to hear you are excited about your experience!
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading John! I appreciate the feedback. I was just talking to a coworker about the fact that it was novel may have made an impact. I also reconsidered the amount of work I was giving and if they were able to process it all. I went through and made slides for the entire unit on what I felt the most important things were and did not have them read. It took me over an hour a night to do so and come up with questions...for each module...and I know what I am doing. This streamlined the process for my students and many more were actually completing the assignment vs. the reading, which most students' notes were simply every bolded term. I will definitely keep you in the loop and good luck down the home stretch!
DeleteSUCH a teaser post. Waiting for the next one...
ReplyDelete