Grades and Feedback

In creating pathways for motivation, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, grades and feedback play an essential role in student's determination, effort, and performance. In this section, I highlight student's experiences with self-regulation and in reaching competency to meet their personal goals.

Feedback that Inspires Competency

In lieu of providing students with the flexibility to personalize their course by regulating their pace through the curriculum, students had more control of their opportunities to reach competency in their course. While designing my gamified course, one of my priorities was to encourage students to reach their highest potential by allowing resubmissions that foster mastery and not penalties. In reading the work of Matt Townsley & David Schmid (2020), they have two suggestions when creating assessments that inspire competency-based learning. "Explicit learning outcomes with respect to the required skills and concomitant proficiency (standards for assessment) and a flexible time frame to master these skills" (p. 3). As the badges established the standards for learning, students created their own flexibility to master skills by pacing themselves to make resubmissions that will not overwhelm their progress in the course.

Because students created their own deadlines, my workload in grading and providing feedback did not come all at once. Instead of setting hard deadlines where all students would submit their essays on the same day, having students submit their work at their own pace made grading more manageable. Receiving all my students' essays by a deadline resulted in long days of grading, which slowed down the process of students getting feedback. When students set their own deadlines, my feedback returned faster, giving them more time to resubmit their papers and reach competency. With students making resubmissions, I was able to communicate more regularly with students since they were incorporating more feedback to improve on their skills (Townsley & Schmid 2020).

Response papers were a clear example of an assignment that was designed to reach competency. Response papers were essays that were between 1-2 pages long and regularly given through the course. In the example below, a student shared his experience writing and applying feedback to reach competency,

"Another huge positive has been response papers. Since I can take the comments from the instructor and use them to fix my papers, it makes me a better writer. On the first response paper, my original grade was 76 and it took me 2 more resubmissions to get it to a 100. On the second response paper, my original grade was an 84 and it only took me one resubmission to get it to a 100. Hopefully, this trend will continue and I can become an even better writer."

The student sought opportunities to improve on his scores and skills by applying relevant feedback to his papers. His self-regulation motivates him to revise his work more than once and sees the benefit of becoming a better writer. Both the flexibility and feedback provide opportunities that inspire the best performance a student can produce. The ability to see the scores go up as the student is resilient in making resubmissions may align with an Incremental-growth theory.

The ability to make resubmissions was taken advantage of by most of my students. Some were more consistent and adamant than others, depending on their self-regulation and self-determination. I hope students found in reaching for competency an appreciation and value for their effort and self-determination by reaching the goals they set for themselves.

Grades Can Promote Effort

As stated earlier, students are motivated by various elements in and outside the classroom, whether they are intrinsic and extrinsic. While grades can be extrinsic motivators, they are also indicators of progress and performance. In the first year of my fellowship, I quickly noticed students' defensive responses to grading. When receiving their assessments back, their eyes would rush to the grade above, followed by addressing questions towards me about why they had "points taken off." In going over my feedback with them, it almost felt as if I was justifying my reasoning behind the grade, rather than ways in which students could improve, and even if students did receive feedback to improve, they had to wait until the next assessment that probably dealt with other skills or content.

In creating assignments and assessments that inspire resubmissions, I wanted students to see feedback as relevant and applicable to raise their grades, which indicated their performance. In my gamified course, it was evident that students were as grade-driven as in my other traditional courses. In reducing the arbitrary control that I may have in grading, resubmissions invited students to apply more effort if they were not satisfied with their grades.

To check-in with my students in the middle of the term, surveyed them and asked, "what is working in the course?" The example below sparked my curiosity since the student had disclosed my initial suspicions about the meaning of feedback when referring to grades:

"I enjoy how the response papers are structured. In other classes I would just get a "B" or a B+" on a paper and then I would be done with it. My teachers would put comments on it but I wouldn't care because I already got my grade. Now, I have real motivation to be able to correct my mistakes and progress faster as a writer."

There is a missed learning opportunity in not letting students apply feedback to improve on their grades. This student identified her motivation to "correct mistakes" and improve as a writer by thinking and applying the given feedback because she was given a chance to improve on her grade. The motivation to seek redemption in grades provided an avenue for more effort applied by the student if they choose to. Angela Lee Duckworth (2018) elaborates on the importance of effort and what it does in the life of a learner, "Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive” (p. 51). Therefore, giving students more control of their learning by creating opportunities for resubmission that inspires the implementation of feedback to increase grades and meet competency is to invite students to increase their level of effort to teach resilience, determination, and perseverance.