If you want to be something when you grow up you must of course have good
grades, to become a bit like what you dreamed of.– Pupils’ perceptions of grades: a narrative analysis – of stories about getting graded for the first time: Amy (not her real name)
We then asked, “How do your students define their value as writers?”
The response was instantaneous and unanimous: “Grades!”– Growing Beyond Grades
What gets measured gets managed and some have said it is precisely because of this that we should be clear on what we are measuring and why we are doing so. A Swedish study on the impact of grades on students also asks what the measurement means. How should kids make sense of their incoming prelim results?
A highly respected someone shared about a study on a public school in a low-income neighbourhood in the United States. Here the kids were faring poorly. Hopes for the future were bleak and interest in studies was fading – I’m never going to meet the criteria to earn my way to a better life was the prevailing mindset. The teachers tried something. They wrote, Not Yet at the bottom of students’ worksheets. These two words found their way into the students’ psyche and reintroduced hope in their self-narrative.
What was this narrative? Teachers are not allowed to have favourite classes. In an alternate universe where this is possible, the class of the about to be mentioned student might be called just that. A student spelled ‘persevered’ wrongly. When asked if they knew what the word meant, one student shouted triumphantly, “Growth mindset!” He is all of ten years of age. One might excuse the dazed surprise which ensued. It turned out that in his primary school in Choa Chu Kang, Growth Mindset is a big thing and the term rolls off the tongue of every student like Roblox or YouTube.
The growth mindset is of course – I may not be there now but I sure am on the way. The connection of this mindset to grades is not difficult to see.
Even so, any discussion of grades is bound to bring to the fore, mixed feelings. Did the efforts bear a dividend? How long will these dividends last? If they did not, what does that make of all that time and energy spent? Or I crossed this hurdle but there will be another hurdle next year and next year and the year after that and after that too. Or I stumbled at this hurdle, does that make me a bad runner? Will this impact my performance at other hurdles down the road?
In Sweden, “since the 1970s” (Lofgren et al., 2019) students did not get any grades, in the way we think of them, until they reached the age of 13 or 14. This meant for the entirety of primary school, students lived in a world without grades. In Finland according to authors of this Swedish study, grading begins at age 10. Then in, 2012 this changed “to address declining results in international measurements like PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2013 as cited in Lofgren et al., 2019). Students began to receive formal grades from age 12.
Swedish policy makers were of the view, “Earlier grading should also be able to get the pupil in the habit of receiving grades, which could perhaps reduce the pressure of grades felt by many of today’s pupils” (Betyg fran arskurs 6 I grundskolan, 2009 as cited in Lofgren et al., 2019).
In Sweden, the discussion on grades includes if they should be granted based on comparison with the cohort or for achievement of some objective criteria. It moved between numbers, 1-5, “a criterion-referenced assessment system”, Pass, Pass with Distinction, Pass with Special Distinction and then it became letters, A-F.
The change to grade students earlier made Professor Lofgren of Linkoping University wonder about outcomes less tangible than cohort performance statistics such as impact on students’ identity and mindsets.
She and her fellow researchers conducted 40 group interviews with 127 12-year-olds from different schools. These kids received grades for the very first time in Year 6, in December of 2012.
She found three types of narratives which reflected three distinct takes on grades.
The first is what may be characterised as the now somewhat outdated Asian view which is that career prospects were predicated on grades. The students in question made comments like, “If you don’t get good grades, you cannot get a job” and “You must fight right now. You must attend lessons and all that.”
The second was indicative of a less deterministic and more complexity acknowledging nature. Here the students made comments like, “It will sort out by itself. It depends on how much [responsibility] you take on when you are an adult” and to the question of Do you think grades are important, “Not in year 6”.
The final narrative was more nuanced. Students in this group felt present grades would not settle what happens in the future but were still important because they motivated them to work harder to reach a higher standard. Here, students made comments like, “But I think, it’s still nice to have grades in year 6 because it is like when you reach seventh grade, it can be like an awful shock” and “it feels like you get confirmed, or a little, how far you have reached. It gets clearer what you need to work harder on, and on how you are doing…”.
Students across groups did characterise their grades, interestingly enough, as, “it is fun sometimes” and “it is a bit fun to see” with regards to friendly competition.
The researchers in their concluding remarks added that pupils in the first group, that is, those who took their grades quite seriously, seemed to have accepted that “it is their responsibility as individuals to design their own life and future” and at the same time, that acknowledging this did not then necessarily mean that they had to let the “pressure to perform take over their lives now”.
A student recently scored for Paper 2 of the English Language paper, like a high performing student might in a Mathematics paper. At the same time, there was an aberration in her composition score. There was an eight mark decrease from her SA1 score which showed she was clearly on the upward trend, having cleared 30 quite comfortably.
Her father had this to say. She cannot really make a turn when she deeply get into something. So that composition thing also happening good to forge her character and personality to make her to be more resilient.
Falling on sand will not hurt as much.
The Brain Dojo
