**9. De-prioritizing grades and high stakes evaluation is good for student engagement and learning**

SDT has a lot to say about the emphasis on grades and high stakes evaluations as a way to motivate students. Although grades and evaluations are ubiquitous in school and most certainly in post-secondary education, their effect on intrinsic motivation and engagement has been shown to be consistently deleterious when used as a motivator of behavior [43]. In education, grades are perceived to be the ultimate reward and incentive and are a universal feature of classrooms all around the country and most of the industrialized world. In school, almost everything is evaluated and graded, and normative comparisons are made with grades as a way to compare students against one another. This social comparison with grades is very pervasive especially in normative grading practices. Although it is often accepted in higher education that grades and other academic rewards serve as great motivators of student behavior, the overwhelming research evidence instead suggest that grades consistently act to reduce intrinsic motivation and internalization, and to be a poor motivational strategy [43].

Educators and school administrators assume that rewards and grades serve as an incentive that will direct behavior in a certain way toward certain outcomes. In fact, this is exactly why grades tend to be perceived as controlling and reduce intrinsic motivation, self-determined motivation, and internalization [9, 43]. Their main function tends to be perceived as a way to control behaviors and shift the perceived locus of causality of the behavior toward external incentives as opposed to internalized and self-directed behaviors. In fact, there is very little empirical evidence or theoretical support suggesting that grades and evaluations have any positive effect on motivation, engagement, and competence [9, 43].

Even though the research evidence supporting the negative impact of grades on motivation is compelling, grades and persistence rates are nonetheless often included as outcome variables in models testing the effect of autonomy supportive environments on educational outcomes. Among the education community, for better or worse, grades are considered a proxy of academic performance and often an outcome variable of interest. In addition, grades, retention, and persistence rates are also common variables required in studies funded by large federal grants, such as those from the Department of Education (DoE) or the National Science Foundation (NSF). In our own research work based on the IMPACT program, we have often included grades as an outcome variable for the reasons mentioned above. What we tend to find is that the effect of autonomy supportive environments and satisfaction of the basic psychological needs on course or semester grade is often small, although positive and significant in the IMPACT very large data sets [12, 36].

Rewards in general and grades specifically carry two distinct functional meanings or significance; one is informational and the other one is controlling. The informational aspect of grades provides competence-relevant feedback to students and can foster improvements in performance through the provision of clear informational feedback, which provides guidance to students. The professional development program IMPACT fosters the use of informational feedback and encourages instructors to think about grades and other forms of evaluations and assessments as a way to provide information to students to foster their academic growth, development, and learning. In some instances, instructors have adopted pedagogical strategies where they do not assign formal grades to students, but instead focus on a developmental process where students are guided to reflect and evaluate their own performance

#### *Perspective Chapter: Fostering Students' Learning Experiences in Higher Education – Reflections… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110327*

against their own standards, established in collaboration with the instructors. This emerging assessment strategy, referred to as "ungrading", is very much aligned with the motivational principles of SDT and has been recently discussed in peer reviewed journals and at national conferences [44, 45]. It emphasizes student learning rather than sorting and judging students. It is focused on student self-evaluation and use of metacognition to assess their own performance and growth. The students assigned themselves a grade at the end of the term, which the instructor has the right to change as appropriate. However, instructors who have been using the practice for several years report that students grade themselves incredibly fairly, sometimes too harshly, and if anything, instructors have had to raise students assigned grades not lower them at the end of the term [45].

Most of the time, however, grades are perceived to be controlling and a way to rank students and place them in categories, with no information on how to improve. Without the informational feedback, grades provide a normative rank about one's standing in relation to other students. They serve a strong social comparison function and often pressure students to do better than someone else, or to perform in a certain way under certain arbitrary conditions. This focus emphasizes the controlling aspect and meaning of the grade and deter students from being interested in learning [9, 43]. These effects are seen in longitudinal naturalistic settings examining the negative impact of grading on outcomes in subsequent years and in controlled laboratory environments [46, 47]. Results showed that the students who studied with the goal of taking a test, reported lower levels of self-determined motivation as well as worse performance on the actual test compared to the students who studied with the goal of teaching the material to other students. This can be explained because the students who studied in order to take a test, mostly experienced the controlling aspect of the grading practice, focused on passing the test, and felt pressured and controlled by the experience. In contrast, the students who focused on teaching the material to others, experienced more of the informational aspect of the activity, and the opportunity to relate the material and actively use the material in an interaction with other students. This condition fostered an autonomy supportive environment through the satisfaction of the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness [46].

One of the most interesting impacts of professional development programs aimed at fostering basic psychological needs and motivation such as the IMPACT program, is the culture shift that occurs once a critical mass of instructors take part in the professional development and begin to experience the benefits of the changes in their pedagogical practices. Instructors talk to other instructors about what they are learning in the program and how they are applying the principles to the courses and the changes they are noticing in their students. Instructors report increased level of engagement in their students, as well as enhanced critical thinking and problem-solving skills, from implementing the motivational principles and creating learning environments that are autonomy supportive and engaging through meeting their students' basic psychological needs. Over the years, instructors have reported on their impressions of the IMPACT professional development program through interviews and focus groups. In the early years of IMPACT, tenured faculty would talk about how good IMPACT was, but they would not recommend instructors to engage with professional development like this too early in their career, because of the greater need to focus on research. In recent years, this narrative has shifted. Tenured faculty are now saying that instead of discouraging early career instructors from participating in IMPACT, everyone should

participate in professional development like this in their first year as instructors. Talk about a culture shift! Emphasizing motivational principles and focusing on people, instructors, and students, as agents of change, and supporting their basic psychological needs, is enacting a shift in the teaching and learning culture and pedagogical practices. It is imperative that we continue to spread this work so that a shift in higher education can occur [42].
