What Types of Students' Effort Are Rewarded with High Marks

Bibliographic Data

ID2328232
AuthorsSean Kelly (0000-0002-2415-0375, Sean Kelly, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame. His main fields of interest are sociology of education, social stratification, social psychology, and quantitative methods. His research focuses on the causes of educational inequality, including problems of students' engagement, the process of matching teachers to classrooms, and the assignment of diverse students to course sequences in high school., corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume81
Issue1
Pages32-52
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociology of Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0407 • E-ISSN: 1939-8573
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/003804070808100102
OpenAlexW2105843950
LanguageEN
Citations received40
References cited36

This analysis of data from the Partnership for Literacy Study investigates the relationship among achievement, effort, and grades. Certainly, grades reward achievement, the mastery of material by students. Research has also suggested that grades are used to reward students for exerting effort to learn material, even if students fall short of mastery. Indeed, some small-scale research has found that teachers reward students for merely cooperating with their instructional plans, for behaviors that may be weakly related or even unrelated to the growth in achievement. This analysis reveals that teachers seldom reward students for nonachievement-related behavior, for keeping instruction moving. In these data from middle school English and language arts classrooms, the vast majority of the variance in grades is accounted for by students' achievement and students' behaviors that are closely related to the growth in achievement. The findings are consistent with the theory that many teachers adopt a 'developmental' perspective on instruction and seek to promote students' achievement by rewarding students' engagement

Academic achievement · General partnership · Literacy · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Perspective (graphical) · Scale (ratio) · Early Childhood Education and Development · Education, Achievement, and Giftedness · Parental Involvement in Education · Psychology