research has found that once we put a score or a grade on an assignment, the student is less likely to review comments or learn from that grade (Butler & Nisan, 1986).
Rather than say, “In the real world you only get one chance,” perhaps our most truthful and most helpful message should be “In the real world, retakes are often available; you just might have to ask for them and put in some additional work.
And, if we teachers are honest with ourselves, it may be easier to assign a zero when a student misses an assignment than to pressure and support the student to complete it. It can be time-consuming and exhausting for the teacher to call parents and caregivers or require students to stay after school until assignments are completed. Yet if we’re committed to making our grades accurate, we can’t give a grade until we have sufficient evidence of a student’s actual level of achievement.
There’s no research that finds that failing grades motivate students, and plenty of research that has found the opposite—that a student who receives 0s and Fs becomes less motivated, not more motivated. Guskey (2009) found that “no studies support the use of low grades as punishment. Instead of prompting greater effort, low grades more often cause students to withdraw from learning.
Even worse, traditional grading that penalizes students for mistakes often isn’t just limited to a student’s academic work. Teachers often assign grades based on mistakes in students’ behaviors as well: downgrading a score if an assignment is late, subtracting points from a daily participation grade if a student is tardy to class, or lowering a group’s grade if the group becomes too noisy while they work. In this environment, every mistake is penalized and incorporated into the final grade. Even if just a few points are docked for forgetting to bring a notebook to class or losing a few points for not heading a paper correctly, the message is clear: All mistakes result in penalties. While some might argue that this is simply accountability—“I asked the students to do something, so it has to count”—it’s missing the forest for the trees. The more assignments and behaviors a teacher grades, the less willing a student will be to reveal her weaknesses and vulnerability. With no zones of learning that are “grade free,” it becomes nearly impossible to build an effective teacher–student relationship and positive learning environment in which students try new things, venture into unfamiliar learning territory, or feel comfortable making errors, and grow. When everything a student does is graded, and every mistake counts against her grade, that student can perceive that to receive a good grade she has to be perfect all of the time. Students don’t feel trust in their teachers, only the pressure to conceal weaknesses and avoid errors.
Unfortunately, in most classrooms teachers penalize students for mistakes they make during the learning process, for assignments that prepare them for the test. Students lose points for errors (and for answers they don’t complete) on homework, classwork, and on any task that the teacher designs to help students learn content. Those scores are entered into the gradebook and included in the overall calculation of a student’s grade. With this grading approach, student mistakes are penalized during the very stage of learning when students should be making mistakes. If mistakes on any work—homework assignments, tests, quizzes, in-class worksheets, discussions—are always penalized with a score that is incorporated into a grade no matter whether those mistakes occur at the beginning, middle, or end of learning, then the message is that mistakes aren’t ever acceptable, much less desired, and they certainly aren’t ever valuable. Students will be discouraged, not encouraged, to take risks and be vulnerable.
Conversations about grading weren’t like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the “real world” and beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.
I’ve copied homework because I left my book in my locker and I didn’t have time to get it before I went home and my class was literally the next period. I had a bad grade—it was a wavering A where it was literally just 90-point something. When you’re that close to getting a B you don’t want to do anything wrong. If we didn’t have the homework, [the teacher] would just give us a zero.” (Annika, middle school student)
A humbling but reluctantly honest reason many of us continue to use the zero on a 100-point scale may be because the zero satisfies a psychological need. While Reeves sardonically recognizes teachers’ need to “punish the little miscreants who fail to complete our assignments” (2004), this need among us to feel satisfaction, to “hold students accountable” for not following our directions, is real and powerful. Guskey (2004) suggests that teachers, particularly at the secondary grades, assign a zero because they recognize that their power over students is relatively limited, and want students to really “feel” the consequences for not performing.
