The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - By Alfie Kohn

I just read this interesting online article by Alfie Kohn, a convincing argument to really rethink grading and assessment, and how that often ruins the real learning. He describes 5 consequences of the over-emphasis on achievement:

1. Students come to regard learning as a chore: They may come to view the tasks themselves—the stories and science projects and math problems—as material that must be gotten through. Extrinsic motivation (i.e. grading) often leads to lower intrinsic motivation.
2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks: students will maximize the probability of success—or at least minimize the probability of failure. They are just being rational human beings.
3. Students tend to think less deeply: Paradoxically, these students who have put success out of their minds are likely to be successful. 
4. Students may fall apart when they fail: It’s important, therefore, to encourage a healthy and resilient attitude toward failure. As a rule, that is exactly what students tend to have if their main goal is to learn: When they do something incorrectly, they see the result as useful information. They figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Not so for the kids who believe (often because they have been explicitly told) that the point is to succeed—or even to do better than everyone else. They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it. Even a momentary stumble can seem to cancel out all their past successes. This is the reinforcement of a “fixed mindset” (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
5. Students value ability more than effort: Researchers have demonstrated that a student with a performance focus—How am I doing? Are my grades high enough? Do I know the right answer?—is likely to interpret these questions “in terms of how much ability [he or she has] and whether or not this ability is adequate to achieve success,” as educational psychologist Carol Dweck and a colleague have explained. In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability. The same accounts for students who explain achievement in terms of intelligence.  

Read the whole article here: The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - By Alfie Kohn.

My own experiences are very much the same: both on university level and highschool, I have been involved in projects in which we tried to remove grading and explicit rewards, and time and again we noticed that the majority of the students felt not at ease without grades and sometimes even resisted to it and asked for grades and explicit assessment (“We want normal education”). Some students however came to flourish, and really did focus on the content, on the process, and their personal development. My experience is that in order to overcome resistance when introducing a learning environment without grading (or less emphasis on achievement) that it really takes time, and that teachers need to make explicit why they choose this approach. A kind of ‘unschooling’.

A learner contract - innovative assessment approach

I just stumbled upon Dave Cormier’s learner contract, a more personalized way that allows students to choose what kind of effort they want to put in the course for which grade. Maybe it’s not new, but I have never heard of it.

Student work in this course is evaluated by ‘contract’ – meaning that each of you decide how much work you would like to do for what grade. Individual assignments are given a ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ assessment upon completion, with the option for you to resubmit unsatisfactory assignments within a given timeframe.