Grading system backfires for girls and struggling students, study shows
A large Swedish study reveals that grades stress out female students and those from less educated families—the opposite of the motivational boost schools expect. The finding challenges how educators use grades as a tool and suggests policymakers may need to rethink assessment strategies to avoid widening achievement gaps.
Originaltitel: Grades as motivators or stressors: the role of gender, cognitive ability, and parental education
Grades are expected to motivate students to perform well in school. However, the connection between grades and student motivation and achievement is not clear. Understanding the relations between grades and student motivation and achievement requires knowledge about students' experiences of being graded, which is underreported in research. This study uses large-scale data to investigate Swedish upper secondary school students' perceptions about how grades influence their motivation. Confirmatory factor analysis has been used to create two factors based on the students' perceptions of being affected by grades: (1) that grades evoke negative emotions and (2) that grades act as an external motivator. Structural equation modeling has been used to relate the factors to background variables (gender, cognitive ability, and parental education), as well as Grade Point Average. Results indicate that grades evoke negative emotions more often among female students, students with lower cognitive ability, and students with lower parental education. Students with higher parental education, as well as female students with higher cognitive ability and highly educated parents, are more likely to perceive that grades act as an external motivator. The results also indicate that the perception of grades evoking negative emotions is negatively related to achievement, whereas the perception that grades act as an external motivator is positively related to achievement.