When I prepared the coming course, “Assessment” as a key word inspired lots of reflections for these materials. “The Case Against Grades” highlights the criticism of grading policy in the current educational policy. From a psychology literature, grading is an incentive system to motivate students to learn. Generally speaking, there are two types of motivations: intrinsic and extrinsic types of motivation (Ryan & Deci 2000). Grades are considered as an extrinsic motivations and have negative effects on students’ intrinsic motivation to learn. In the 1980s and 90s, educational psychologists systematically concluded the effects of grades system. All findings support that grades do harms to students’ intrinsic learning motivations. However, intrinsic motivations of learning play a more significant role in people’s behaviors than extrinsic motivations do.
Even though we know these traditional incentive systems can’t work as we expected, what kind of incentive systems we hope to have? In the video of “Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation”, he clearly suggested a new approach from scientists. The approach is setup more based on intrinsic motivations. There are three elements for the approach: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy makes people pursue their what they want freely. They decide themselves to study what they want. Mastery means the competence to achieve the goal. In order to implement the goal, people would like to invest their efforts into building the capacity. Purpose is the goal that people want to reach. They would like to know the destination they want to go to. All these elements clarify the essential of intrinsic motivations.
Although we know extrinsic motivation systems like gold stars, honor roles and other reward-focused systems dominated long time in the currency of schools, we should clearly think about deeply the significance of intrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivations are the only determinant for people willing to learn spontaneously.