Some educators and parents want to abolish school grading, even though most parents want to boast that his or her child is " a straight A student," " at the top of her class," or " on the honor roll." What generally determines this prized status? Grades. Most often, report cards are the primary means of measuring a child's progress through school. Doing " well" in school is measured by a series
. of letters on a piece of paper: A is great; B is better; C, not so great; Ds and Fs are cause for grounding. Some parents reward children for good grades, ascribing a monetary value to each good letter, or taking away privileges for each bad one. For many families, the grade is the goal. But, what do those letters really mean, and do they really do any good?Many researchers, educators and parents are now questioning the purpose and effectiveness of grades. Certainly parents deserve to know how their children are doing in school, and students benefit from understanding how they are performing; but how that progress is communicated can have a great impact on how a child learns.Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and " Tougher Standards"??and Punished by Rewards, writes extensively about the influence of grades on learning. To put it positively, students who are lucky enough to be in schools (or classrooms) where they don't get letter or number grades are more likely to want to continue exploring whatever they're learning, more likely to want to challenge themselves, and more likely to think deeply. The evidence on all of these effects is very clear, and it seems to apply to students of all ages.According to Kohn, there's a tendency to assume that any negative effects "" of grades or other things "" must be limited to the details of implementation. Thus, figuring out how to grade " more effectively" will eliminate the harms. With grades, this appears not to be the case. The problem is inherent to reducing what students have done "" and, by extension, reducing the students themselves "" to letter or number ratings.In one study, irrespective of how well they had been doing in school, students were subsequently less successful at the tasks, and also reported less interest in those tasks, if they received a grade rather than narrative feedback. Other research has produced the same result: Grades almost always have a detrimental effect on how well students learn and how interested they are in the topic they're learning.www.education.com/magazine/article/Grades_Any_Good/www.joebower.org/p/abolishing-grading.html More reference links: wwwww.education.com/magazine/article/Grades_Any_Good/l www.joebower.org/p/abolishing-grading.html
