First Person

Failing to Motivate

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By James M. Lang

He sat in the front row, off to the side, and whenever I caught his eye he would give me a half-smile and a nod of his head, as if he were happy and grateful to have me acknowledge his existence on this earth. He spoke in class, capably enough, and he always seemed attentive -- a blessing in the required general-education course that I was teaching. He was a student in my "Introduction to Literature" course, and it was my second year on the tenure track.

I was both surprised and depressed, then, when I received his first paper for the semester. It was about the worst piece of writing I had seen in my first year and a half as an assistant professor of English. I agonized over the grade he deserved; I couldn't decide between an F or a D. I had not given out more than a handful of F's or D's in my first year, so giving those grades still seemed daunting to me.

I settled on the D, but I gave it to him with trepidation. My concern was that the D would send him from the front row to the back row, where he would turn his baseball cap backward and scowl at me for the rest of the semester.

I couldn't have been more wrong. That D motivated him to come see me about his next paper, and the one after that, and just about every other one in the four subsequent courses he took with me over the next three years. He even asked me to be his adviser, and it has been one of the pleasures of my young career to track his considerable intellectual progress.

The pedagogical gods, however, would not allow me even the momentary pleasure of believing that I had learned a certain truth about teaching from that incident, and about the motivating power of grades.

That same semester, in that very same class, I had a student who made her home in the back row, along with a friend or two who apparently shared her lack of interest in the course. With this student -- who spoke rarely and eyed me with a look of bemused indifference -- I had little hesitation about stamping a D on her second assignment.

What she needs, I thought to myself as I dropped her paper grimly on her desk, was an intellectual kick in the rear, in the form of a grade that would scare her into better behavior in class and more effort on her written work.

She was absent the next class. When she showed up for the one after that, her attitude seemed -- if possible -- worse than before. She didn't come to see me about her next assignment, as I had suggested she do, and it was as poor as the previous one.

In both of those D narratives, I had my pedagogical expectations overturned. Nothing new there. But what I found especially confounding was that the two experiences told me two contrasting stories about grades and motivation.

In the first story, low grades served the purpose we all hope they do: They motivated the student to get his academic life in gear. In the second story, low grades served the purpose we all fear that they do: They discouraged the student, and caused her to disengage further from the class.

The two narratives forced me to think more closely about the relationship between grades and motivation than I ever had before, and to consider whether I should use grades as a motivating tool at all.

We all do that, of course. Who among us has not issued a low grade -- perhaps one even slightly harsher than the work deserved -- to a promising but underperforming student, with the idea that it would give the student an extra push to reach his or her potential?

And who among us has not had a student who showed marked improvement in our course, but who was still underperforming, leading us to nudge the student's grade up a notch or two because we wanted to ensure that he or she didn't give up in frustration?

I probably do one or both of those things, in some form, at least once a semester. But my experience with such students has left me increasingly skeptical about the wisdom of those actions. I could have probably come to that realization earlier if I had looked to my own experiences as a student.

I still remember the first and only C I ever received on a college-level writing assignment. It was not my first and only C in college; I picked them up occasionally in my required math and science courses.

But I expected high grades in courses that relied on writing; I was an English major, after all, and an aspiring writer. I was a philosophy major, too, so in my junior year I found myself in a course taught by a renowned philosopher. In addition to his lectures, I attended weekly sessions with a teaching assistant who handled the grading of the papers.

My first paper for the course was probably no masterpiece; but I still believe to this day that it didn't deserve the C+ he put on it. I was apoplectic. I assumed the TA was either an idiot or malicious.

I worked like mad on the next paper, and my grade improved. It improved a little further with each subsequent paper, but it never achieved the level I hoped and expected to receive in courses in my majors.

You might say that that low grade motivated me, since I worked much harder on my subsequent papers, and the grades did improve.

But that doesn't tell the whole story.

I was so incensed about the grades that I disengaged from that course completely. I was a trained seal jumping through hoops. I wanted my fish, and I was willing to jump through whatever hoops that the teaching assistant set up. But I learned nothing. I remember nothing from the course. In fact, I don't even remember what the course was about.

With hindsight, I can see that my response to that low grade mirrored the contradictory responses I received from the two students to whom I gave D's in my "Introduction to Literature" course: engagement and disengagement.

I have a colleague who tells yet another story about his grades in college. He coasted along on good grades in high school, and he entered college in the same mind-set. Instead, his professors gave him the low grades he deserved for his half-hearted academic efforts.

Those grades changed his life. He was forced to consider whether academic success mattered to him, and he decided that it did. He turned his academic career around and worked hard enough to earn admittance to graduate school.

In his mind, those low grades were the most important motivating factor in inspiring what has now become a very successful academic career as a college faculty member.

So many low grades, so many different reactions. What's the best method for using grades to motivate students for academic success?

It seems to me that the only way you could effectively use grades as a motivating tool would be to ensure that any such effort corresponded with a student's personality and life situation, since how students respond to both low and high grades seems to depend on many factors that are out of our control.

Students with high levels of self-confidence will respond to low grades with increased effort. Students with low levels will shut down and withdraw from the course. Students who are struggling with personal problems may see their low grades as one more of life's burdens, and resign themselves to receiving more of them. Students who have risen from difficult circumstances may see their low grades as one more obstacle to overcome.

The list of possibilities is endless. And of course we don't know our students well enough to make the kinds of judgments about their self-confidence and circumstances that would enable us to calibrate their grades to achieve the desired level of motivation we want.

And that leaves only one solution: Don't use grades as a motivating tool at all.

In the few years I spent doing research on teaching and learning in higher education, I developed a pretty firm set of ideas about teaching. I have my preferred models of course design, my preferred methods in the classroom, my preferred kinds of assignments.

In only one area of the teaching enterprise could I never seem to find agreement among the experts: grading. What grades mean, what standards we should use, what kinds of response we should give to student work -- in all of those areas, I saw multiple arguments and theories that made sense to me, but were often incompatible.

That has led me, over my last four and a half years of full-time teaching, to believe that the only thing that really matters is transparency. Convey clearly to the students the criteria for your grades, and ensure that they have the tools and opportunity to meet your criteria. How they respond is beyond your control.

So I have been trying to wean myself from the practice of using grades to motivate student learning. Grading to motivate doesn't work if you are transparent about the grading process. Imagine giving a low grade to a student because you want to push them into working harder, and writing a brief accompanying note: This grade doesn't really reflect your work; I am using it to motivate you.

The student would be rightly outraged at that -- and should be equally outraged if he or she were to receive a similar note explaining that a high grade was not necessarily a reflection of the work put into the assignment, but a reward for good behavior ("Good Doggie!").

Since we can't be transparent with our students about the reasons for their grades when we have used those grades to motivate them -- and I don't think we can -- then we probably shouldn't be doing it at all.