About “Life Beyond Grades”

 Overview Of The Book

Teacher: What did you get out of the class?

Student: I got an A.

 

Introduction

Perhaps nothing frustrates college instructors more than when students focus exclusively on the pursuit of grades and in the process fail to appreciate the power of learning for the sake of self-expression, personal growth, and meaningful discovery. Many college students appear grade driven, even “grade grubbing.” Indeed, we have found that many students rate achieving the highest grade possible as the main reason for undertaking assignments, with such intrinsic reasons as overcoming a personal challenge coming in a distant second (Covington & Wiedenhaupt, 1997). Ironically, we also find that students often accuse instructors of rarely encouraging the same intrinsic aspects of learning that instructors, in their turn, lament that students have come to disregard. This insight reveals that both students and instructors would like to place greater emphasis on learning but feel thwarted by the other party. Our book, “Life Beyond Grades” is about the nature of this seeming impasse: its origins, its consequences, and, above all, how it can be avoided for the mutual benefit of all.

Understanding Causes

The first main theme of Life Beyond Grades involves understanding the underlying causes of this stalemate. At first glance, the predominant grade focus may seem intractable. Grades are not only sought after by students; they are also feared by students, with the high performers being seen as brilliant, hardworking, and personally worthy while the low performers are judged to be none of these things. This situation is made worse still by the fact that good grades are often made scarce by competitive pressures, so that many students must struggle to avoid failure rather than aspire to success. The scarcer the good grades become, the greater the importance that grades assume as evidence of superior ability. Faced with this confection of fear, materialism, and a rat race mentality, educators may despair at the prospects of ever encouraging a love of learning among their students. On this website we will explore whether intrinsic educational goals such as subject matter appreciation can coexist to any degree, let alone flourish, in the face of what appears to be a single-minded performance ethic based on grades. Indeed, is there life beyond grades?

Promoting Academic Engagement

The second main purpose of Life Beyond Grades is to provide answers to the questions posed above. To anticipate our response, the answer is yes; intrinsic engagement and a love of learning can coexist with the competing pressure of grades, but often only barely. In order to encourage a vibrant intellectual life of the mind, we must overhaul the ways we teach so that we can offset the customary yet divisive dynamics that drive a preoccupation with grades. Even if grades were to be eliminated – a most improbable scenario in any event – it would do little to ease the situation. This is because grades per se are less the problem than is the distorted meaning of grades as indices of personal worth. Thus, the task before us as educators is to teach in ways that encourage students to alter the meaning of grades and accord them a more positive role in the learning process.

The ambitious objective of Life Beyond Grades is nothing less than elevating positive task engagement to the level of a preeminent teaching goal, coequal with goals we hold for knowledge and skill acquisition and demonstration. But before there is any real hope of achieving these goals, we need to understand more about the psychological nature of this underappreciated aim, task engagement itself – what factors sustain it and what circumstances act to undermine it.

To do so, we will appeal to the empirical research from the decades-long scientific study of human motivation as it applies to achievement goals and to the phenomenon of intellectual commitment and task engagement. While there is still much yet to be learned, nonethless we know enough presently to make a difference for the better in real-world classrooms where we encounter competing motivations.

Blueprint for Change

The third, and arguably the most important, aspect of Life Beyond Grades involves the matter of solutions. We will provide a blueprint or road map for developing college courses whose highest priority is to encourage the twin goals of content mastery and the will to learn over a lifetime. This blueprint, practical and comprehensive, has been developed as part of a graduate seminar at Berkeley co-taught by the authors over the past decade. The seminar challenged, and now the book challenges, instructors as follows: “What would a course in your discipline look like based on motivational principles intended to enhance a love of learning and intrinsic engagement, above and beyond subject matter mastery and performance goals?”

The blueprint developed to aid in the course design process takes the form of a series of sometimes counter-intuitive steps that form the structure of this book, chapter by chapter, with the content of each chapter providing both theoretical and practical guidance to assist readers in designing courses. (The blueprint, found in Appendix A of the book, can be found here (link to page on the website.)) The book offers several other important features.

First, it is suitable for several purposes and for a diverse range of audiences. This book is written primarily for instructors who are designing or redesigning their own courses. Additionally, however, the book can form the basis for an advanced pedagogy seminar similar to one described in Life Beyond Grades, designed to prepare future faculty for teaching careers as well as the training of current graduate student assistants, postdocs, and adjunct professors. Also, we have successfully employed the book as the nucleus for faculty and staff workshops for teacher and curriculum development.

Also, educators and administrators at all school levels as well as parents (especially of college students and those who are college-bound) will find valuable insights in these pages because they illuminate the fundamental dynamics of the motivation to learn and reveal obstacles to learning, in virtually all school settings. Anyone wishing to understand the sometimes perplexing motivational dynamics of students (for example in procrastination) will benefit from an appreciation of the self-worth theory of motivation that lies at the heart of this book.

A second feature allows readers to follow the step-by-step development of three case studies, one drawn from the social sciences, another from the biological sciences, and the third from the humanities. These case studies illustrate the diversity of approaches and pathways that the course design process can take. Additionally, the fact that these case studies represent three decidedly different academic domains, each with its own assumptions and conventions for what constitutes scientific and scholarly evidence, its preferred methodologies of inquiry, and its unique intellectual histories and traditions, strengthens our claim to the generalizability of our approach to college course development.

In overall summary, then, this book is intended to function variously: first, as a scientific inquiry into the nature and nurturing of intrinsic motivation; second, as a bridge between psychological theory and educational practice; and, third, as a principled blueprint for creating educational change in the college classroom.

 

Publisher’s Book Description

This book raises the question of whether or not educators can promote intrinsic motivation among college students when they seem overwhelmingly focused on grades. Indeed, can there be life beyond grades? The answer is ‘Yes’. A love of learning can coexist, even thrive, in the face of competing pressures from grades. Drawing on recent, ground-breaking classroom research, the authors articulate a new understanding of the causes of the stalemate between intrinsic and external motivation, so that a reconciliation between them can be achieved. Then the authors apply a powerful set of motivational and pedagogical principles to lay out a step-by-step blueprint for designing and teaching college courses that promote intrinsic motivation as a primary educational goal in its own right, above and beyond knowledge and skill acquisition. This practical blueprint draws on authentic case study examples from a variety of subject-matter disciplines.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and overview
2. The sum of all doubts
3. Roles and responsibilities
4. Prospects for intrinsic task engagement
5. Solutions as goals
6. Scaffolding problem-solving strategies
7. Partnering instruction and assessment
8. From goals to final grades
9. The end of the beginning.