Should Grades Reflect Effort or Mastery?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why grades should communicate not just mastery, but also student effort and work habits.
Key Takeaways
- Tests Already Measure Mastery - If you want a pure, objective measure of learning, tests already serve that purpose well.
- Grades Should Add Information - Report card grades are more useful when they include effort, completion, and learning-focused behaviors teachers observe.
- Teacher Judgment Matters - Teachers provide valuable professional insight into how hard a student is working and where growth is possible.
- Parents Want Effort Information - Families care deeply about whether students are trying, turning in work, and working up to their potential.
- Effort Is a Key Lever - Ability may be less malleable, but effort can be influenced by educators and parents, and grades can help motivate it.
Full Transcript
Should grades reflect effort or only mastery of the content? A lot of people say that grades should only reflect actual learning and nothing subjective like how hard the student's working or, you know, their learning-focused behaviors or anything like that. And sometimes people even say they don't believe in any kind of completion grade, that everything should be a pure measure of learning.
The thing about using grades as a pure measure of learning is it's redundant. We already have pure measures of learning in the form of tests. If you want something objective, if you want something measurable that's about the learning itself and nothing else, that's a test.
We already have standardized tests, and they're already great for that purpose. There's been a lot of talk lately about how parents are often deceived by inflated report card grades that make them think their kids are doing better than they are. And they look at the test scores
and they kind of disregard them when the test scores say one thing and the grades say another. Oh, the test score says your kid is reading way below level, but the teacher says on the report card your kid is fine. I think if we have a big discrepancy
like that, like, if a kid is well below grade level and getting straight A's, like, yes, that is an inflation problem. Something is clearly wrong.
But I don't think the solution is to try to take everything else out of grades other than learning, because we're losing information if we do that. It is valuable to know how hard is this kid working. Is this kid working up to their potential? Is there opportunity for improvement here? Or, you know, what's going on? Because behind every test score...
There's some combination of effort and ability and the teacher's contribution, right? It's a combined measure of all of those. And we need the subjective professional judgment of the teacher to tell us, how hard is this kid working? Where's the opportunity for improvement here? Teachers can give parents that information, and parents have said over and over again in surveys that they greatly value that information. They want to know, how hard is my kid working?
Is my kid trying? Are they putting forth effort? Are they turning in their work? Is their work...
You know, done well, all of those things that don't necessarily show up in test scores do matter to parents because they matter for effort. And effort is one of our big leverage points, right? You know, how academically inclined a student is, you know, in terms of their actual abilities is not very malleable.
But we have the potential as educators and as parents to get more out of kids, to inspire them, to push them, to get them to work hard. And grades are a major way that we do that. So I don't think we should reduce grades to just pure measures of learning.
Let me know what you think.