Influence of Grading Practices on Motivation to Learn (continued)

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Fifth, teachers should work to promote positive beliefs about ability among their students. An incremental view of intelligence, viewing it as the ability to learn instead of the ability to outscore classmates, will foster motivational equity. Finally, Covington recommends improving relationships between teachers and students. Sharing the power to decide about learning and sharing the responsibility for evaluating that learning will make a big step in this direction.

Covington and Mûeller (2001) made the case that approach and avoidance motivations were more important than mastery or performance goal orientations. In particular, any kind of approach-oriented striving, whether for knowledge or for recognition, stood in stark contrast to “avoidance goals driven by the fear of failure.” The harm was not whether the goals were internal or external, but whether there was fear:

These avoidance goals present a worrisome picture. Yet they are unlikely to be caused primarily by the offering of reward such as grades or even by their extrinsic character. As we see it, the problem is not that grades are essentially foreignor extrinsic to the act of learning itselfbut, quite the opposite: Grades have become inexorably linked to the achievement process. Grades are highly charged with personal meaning. For many students grades carry the burden of defining their worth. The underlying reality is that intrinsic values become imperiled not principally because of the tangible, extrinsic features of the rewards that dominate in school, but because all too often the individuals’ sense of worth becomes equated with high marks that are rendered scarce by competitive rules. (pp. 166–167)

Covington and Mûeller pointed out that students strive for the highest grade they can achieve for different reasons related to the degree to which knowledge is valued. If students strive for good grades to impress other people or to avoid failure, then learning is valuable only to the extent that it enhances the student’s status. If students strive for grades in order to use the feedback to improve their learning, then grades become part of the learning process itself. In this way, Covington and Mûeller acknowledge what others have called mastery and performance orientations, but they interpret these as reasons for the primary striving (approaching or avoiding) students exhibit. They described four “kinds” of students that many teachers would recognize. Notice how grades play a role in each.

Failure-avoiding students are not motivated to approach learning, and they are very motivated to avoid failure. They use self-defeating strategies like setting impossibly high goals. When they fail to meet them, they can protect themselves from being thought “failures”; after all, no one could be expected to achieve impossibly high goals. Achievement brings relief, at least temporarily, at not being found out as incompetent. For these students, caring about grades undermines learning not because grades are external rewards, say Covington and Mûeller, but because for these students grades have come to mean measures of their self-worth.

Success-oriented students are motivated to approach learning, and are not particularly motivated to avoid failure. They would risk temporary failure in their efforts to learn, and would interpret failure as feedback that a learning goal was not yet mastered. Success-oriented students interpret grades not so much as external rewards, despite the fact that they are usually awarded by teachers, but as information they can use in their own learning.

Overstrivers are motivated to approach learning, but they are also motivated to avoid failure. In effect, succeeding as learners is their strategy for avoiding failure. Getting good grades is the external meter for this group that tells how well they have succeeded. Unfortunately, avoiding failure with a good grade in one assignment carries a natural punishment for this group, since they have that much more to prove next time.

Finally, failure-accepting students are motivated neither to approach learning nor to avoid failure. Threats of bad grades will not convince these students to expend extra effort. Offering rewards to these students won’t do that, either. Failure-accepting students may drop out of school, or if they stay in school, it is for a reason outside of their success or failure in the classroom. Covington’s instructional guidelines for motivational equity (Figure 3-1) are especially important for these students.