Entrance Slip: What do marks do in school?

1. Assigning percentages and letter grades is on the surface is an accessible and straightforward assessment method, giving the teacher a quantitative measure of a student's level of learning and understanding of the material. We know however that grades are not straightforward and tests do not necessarily reflect a student's true understanding of concepts and development. While grades can be positive in giving students a relative measure of their own learning and even be considered by some students to be motivating if they do not receive a grade that they expected, but it is readily apparent that tests, grades, and even deadlines can influence a student negatively in creating stress and anxiety. 2. Grades can have numerous unintended side effects, both positive and negative. This is very much dependent on the student, their status in that particular situation, and those can change over the course of a class or a semester. These side effects be segregating and create competition (although those can be two different things as well as a combined effect). Quite often, being marked can be demoralizing and decrease effort in classroom i.e. negative marks = demoralized and decreased effort negatively while positive marks if a student didn't put much effort in but received a high grade regardless - this can result in decreased effort/intrinsic motivation, with the student 'cruising' instead of putting in meaningful effort, therefore decreasing their learning. Most commonly however, when the focus is on grades instead of tasks and learning (stress) learning is decreased overall because students tend to focus on memorizing instead of real learning. 3. Teaching science without grades based on all of the negative effects of grades seems ideal. Using methods such as having students share/discuss their learnings and having them collaboratively create assessment criteria and rubric as a class seem extremely engaging and effective in encouraging students to learn without the immense pressure of having those criteria forced upon them. The reading also indicates that students can lean into their interests by being able to choose their topics. This freedom of choice and the space to self-direct their learning seems to increase intrinsic motivation and result in meaningful, engaged learning. I would very much like to use these methods in my own classrooms as my own personal teaching style will involve a lot of connecting students to the material to be covered by guiding them to see the connections to the 'real'world' outside of the classroom and ideally creating interest, if not passion, for the subject material because they can relate it to their every day lives.