Do Grades Motivate Kids? What the Research Actually Says

A seventh grader gets an A on her history essay. She puts it in her folder, doesn’t look at it again, and starts working on the next assignment. A different seventh grader gets a C+ on the same assignment. He reads the teacher’s comments, argues about one of them at length, and writes three pages the following weekend because the topic got under his skin. The grades didn’t predict who was more motivated. In some ways, they predicted the opposite. The A went to the student who’d already learned how to give the teacher what she wanted. The C+ went to the student who cared about the ideas.

This is not an argument against grading. It’s a prompt. The question of whether grades motivate kids is deceptively simple — and the research answer is deceptively complex.

Key Takeaways

• Grades can increase short-term effort but consistently reduce intrinsic motivation for the task being graded — this is one of the most replicated findings in motivation research.
• The undermining effect (Deci & Ryan) describes how external rewards, including grades, shift children’s motivational orientation from “I want to learn this” to “I want to get the grade.”
• Grades are most motivating for children who are already extrinsically motivated, and least motivating — or actively harmful — for children who are intrinsically motivated before grading begins.
• Formative feedback without grades produces better learning outcomes than grades alone in most research contexts.
• Abolishing grades is not a solution supported by the research — the problem is how grades are used, not that they exist.

The Problem: What We Think Grades Do vs. What They Actually Do

Most parents, teachers, and school administrators operate on an intuitive theory of grades: children work to earn good grades, avoid bad ones, and the grading system thereby produces effort. This theory is partially right and partially wrong — and the partial wrongness is important enough to understand in detail.

The theory works when a student is already oriented toward performance outcomes — when they care about demonstrating competence rather than developing it. For that student, a grading system provides clear feedback on how well they’re meeting the performance standard, and they adjust their effort accordingly. This is real. Grades do this.

What the theory misses is what grades do to a student’s relationship with the content itself. When an activity gets graded, the grade becomes the point. A child who was curious about history because history is interesting is now curious about history to the extent that it earns points. That shift is not obvious while it’s happening, and it’s easy to mistake continued effort — effort directed at grade-earning — for continued interest. But the research distinguishes them. The motivation type matters as much as the motivation level, and grading consistently shifts the type.

This doesn’t mean grades are simply bad. It means they’re a specific tool with specific effects — and using them without understanding those effects produces unintended consequences that can persist long after a particular class ends.

What the Research Actually Says

The foundational framework is Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan over more than four decades of empirical work. SDT distinguishes between intrinsic motivation (engaging in an activity for its inherent interest or enjoyment) and extrinsic motivation (engaging for external rewards or to avoid punishment). Deci and Ryan’s research, published across dozens of studies in journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Review, established that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are not simply addends — adding external rewards to an intrinsically interesting activity does not increase total motivation. It often decreases intrinsic motivation specifically.

This is the “undermining effect,” also called “overjustification” in earlier literature. The mechanism, as Deci and Ryan theorize it, is that external rewards shift a person’s perceived locus of causality — the reason they experience themselves as doing something. When a child reads for pleasure, the locus is internal. When a child reads for a grade, the locus shifts external. When the grade is removed, the internal locus has been weakened, and the child reads less. The activity has been reframed as work.

Deci and Ryan’s 1999 meta-analysis of 128 studies in Psychological Bulletin, with co-authors Koestner and colleagues, found that tangible, expected rewards significantly undermine intrinsic motivation across age groups. Grades are the prototypical tangible, expected reward in academic settings. The meta-analysis found the undermining effect to be robust across cultures, age groups, and content domains.

Kohn’s 1999 synthesis of the grading research in The Schools Our Children Deserve (also reflected in his 2011 review “The Case Against Grades” in Educational Leadership) drew on Deci & Ryan and additional research to make the case that grades consistently undermine learning. Kohn’s position is frequently cited but also frequently overstated by advocates: he does not argue that feedback itself is harmful, only that the specific form of feedback grades represent — ranking, summative, evaluation-focused — consistently produces the wrong motivational effects.

Butler’s research provides important nuance. Ruth Butler’s 1988 study in the Journal of Educational Psychology is one of the most replicated in this domain. She compared three feedback conditions: grades only, comments only, and grades plus comments. Students who received comments only showed the highest intrinsic motivation, task engagement, and learning outcomes. Students who received grades only showed the lowest. Students who received grades plus comments showed — counterintuitively — outcomes similar to grades only, not comments only. The implication: when a grade is present, students focus on it and discount the feedback. The “grades plus comments” model, which most schools use, may be getting the worst of both rather than the best.

When grades help: Research does identify conditions under which grades function as positive motivators. Covington’s 2000 synthesis in Annual Review of Psychology on motivation and achievement distinguished between performance-approach goals (wanting to demonstrate competence relative to others) and mastery goals (wanting to develop competence). Students with performance-approach orientations — a large share of academically high-achieving students — respond well to clear, comparative grading signals. They use grades as information. For these students, unclear or absent grading produces anxiety rather than freedom.

Grades also function well as motivators when they provide clear, specific information about skill gaps in domains where mastery progression is sequential and explicit — mathematics being the clearest example. A child who knows they missed three geometry problems doesn’t need to be told the grade produced that learning. But the grade, in this context, is doing something precise and connected to skill development. That function is different from a letter grade on an essay about the French Revolution.

Pulfrey, Buchs, and Butera (2011) published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology a series of studies showing that grading introduces a performance-vs-learning tradeoff: graded students chose easier tasks to protect their grades, while ungraded students chose more challenging tasks that offered more learning. This strategic task selection — grade-protecting behavior — is one of the least-discussed costs of heavy grading cultures. Children don’t just learn to produce what’s graded. They learn to avoid what might hurt their grade.

Grading Approaches and Their Documented Effects

Grading Approach	Effect on Intrinsic Motivation	Effect on Learning Outcomes	Effect on Risk-Taking	Conditions Where It Works Best
Traditional letter grades only	Undermines intrinsic motivation (robust finding)	Mixed — may increase effort, reduces depth	Reduces risk-taking; students choose easier tasks	Performance-approach students; sequential skill domains
Comments/narrative feedback only	Preserves or increases intrinsic motivation	Strong — students engage with feedback content	Increases willingness to attempt hard tasks	Mastery-oriented students; creative/open-ended work
Grades + comments	Undermines intrinsic motivation at similar rates to grades alone	Mixed — comments often ignored	Similar to grades alone	Rarely optimal; comments get discounted
Standards-based grading	Moderate effect on intrinsic motivation	Generally positive — clearer skill signals	Moderate — less grade anxiety than norm-referenced	Skill-sequential domains; growth mindset contexts
Contract/self-assessment grading	Preserves intrinsic motivation	Positive in motivated students	High risk-taking; increased challenge-seeking	Self-directed learners; project-based contexts
No grades / ungraded	Mixed; depends heavily on student motivation baseline	Strong in intrinsically motivated students; weaker without external structure	High	Gifted students; highly motivated populations
Portfolio-based assessment	Positive — process-oriented, not product-ranked	Strong when feedback is specific	Moderate to high	Writing, arts, project-based learning

What to Actually Do

Understand the difference between grades as feedback and grades as ranking

Grades that tell a child “here is where you are relative to mastering this specific skill” function differently from grades that tell a child “here is where you are relative to other children.” The first type provides information that can drive mastery learning. The second type primarily signals status, and research on relative ranking in academic settings consistently shows it produces either complacency (for top rankers) or avoidance (for low rankers) more than it produces growth effort.

If your child’s school uses traditional letter grades, ask the teacher what the grade is measuring. A teacher who can answer “this grade reflects her accuracy on calculating volume — she has this skill, but not yet this one” is using grades more informatively. A teacher who can only say “it reflects her overall performance in math” is using grades more as ranking signals.

Watch for the task-choice effect at home

If your child consistently chooses the easy option on a graded project — the topic they already know, the book they’ve already read — that’s grade-protecting behavior. It’s rational given the incentive structure, but it means the grading system is actively reducing what they’re learning. Countering it requires having explicit conversations about what the goal of school is, separate from the goal of grades.

Don’t add your own grade pressure to the school’s

One of the most consistent findings in this research is that parental performance pressure amplifies the undermining effect of grades. Children who experience both school grading and home praise/criticism tied to grades shift more strongly toward extrinsic motivation than children whose home environment decouples effort from grade outcome. Praising effort and curiosity rather than grades is a specific, research-supported parenting move.

Pay attention to what your child does with teacher feedback

A reliable proxy for whether your child is in a grade-focused or learning-focused mode: do they read the teacher’s comments? Children who read comments and respond to them — who come home and say “my teacher said I need to develop my argument more, so I’m going to try that” — are using the feedback system productively regardless of the grade. Children who look at the letter and put the paper away have been trained (by the grading system and often by home responses to grades) to treat the letter as the endpoint.

If grades are causing disproportionate anxiety, that’s a signal

Some grade pressure in a graded system is normal and not harmful. Anxiety that disrupts sleep, causes avoidance of school, or produces significant emotional dysregulation around tests and evaluations is a signal that the extrinsic pressure has overtaken the learning function entirely. This isn’t a problem that better grades will fix — it requires changing the child’s relationship to grades, which is a more substantial intervention. School counselors, psychologists, and therapists who specialize in academic anxiety have specific tools for this.

What to Watch for Over the Next 3 Months

Week 4: When your child receives a graded assignment back, observe the first 30 seconds. Do they look at the grade and close the folder, or do they read the comments? The behavior reveals their current orientation more reliably than anything they say about school.

Month 2: Ask your child what they’re curious about in school — not what they’re doing well in. Curiosity and grade performance are related but not identical. A child who can name something they’re genuinely curious about is retaining some intrinsic motivation. A child who can only name what they’re getting good grades in may have already shifted fully toward extrinsic orientation.

Month 3: Watch for strategic task selection. If your child has choices in school (book selection, project topic, essay question options), note whether they choose for interest or for ease. Consistent ease-selection is grade-protecting behavior. If it’s happening at 8 or 9 years old, it’s worth having a direct conversation about choosing hard things on purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

If grades are so motivationally harmful, why do so many high-achieving kids have good grades?

Grades and intrinsic motivation aren’t mutually exclusive — many children develop both. The research finding is that grading, on average and across populations, shifts motivation toward extrinsic orientations. It doesn’t prevent high achievement. It does tend to narrow what children are willing to do (they become more risk-averse) and why they’re doing it (for performance rather than learning). Many high-achieving students are achieving extrinsically motivated goals efficiently — which is not the same as deep learning.

Should schools eliminate grades?

The research doesn’t support this as a universal prescription. Grades are genuinely useful as motivators for some students, in some domains, under some conditions. The problem is that most schools apply grading uniformly rather than strategically. A more evidence-based approach would use grades explicitly in sequential skill domains where mastery tracking is valuable, and use narrative feedback more heavily in open-ended, creative, or project-based work.

My child has a growth mindset but still gets stressed about grades. What’s going on?

Growth mindset and extrinsic motivation aren’t incompatible — a child can believe ability is developable and still be primarily motivated by external evaluation. Stress about grades is a sign of extrinsic orientation, not necessarily fixed mindset. The intervention is similar in either case: decoupling home reinforcement from grade outcomes, building in intrinsically motivated learning activities that aren’t graded, and having explicit conversations about the purpose of evaluation.

Are there grading systems that work better than letter grades?

Standards-based grading and portfolio-based assessment both show better outcomes in research than traditional letter grades, particularly for preserving intrinsic motivation and producing specific, actionable feedback. Contract grading (where students agree in advance on what they’ll produce for a given grade) increases student autonomy and tends to preserve motivation better. These systems are more common in progressive and private school settings but are increasingly adopted in public schools.

Does grade inflation help or hurt?

The research suggests grade inflation has mixed effects. It reduces some anxiety (fewer students at the bottom) but weakens the informational value of grades (an A tells you less when most students receive A’s). The primary cost of grade inflation may be the loss of grades as diagnostic tools — when grades no longer reliably signal mastery, the one clear benefit they provide is removed.

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About the author

Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.

Sources

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2. Butler, R. (1988). Enhancing and undermining intrinsic motivation: The effects of task-involving and ego-involving evaluation on interest and performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.1988.tb00874.x

3. Pulfrey, C., Buchs, C., & Butera, F. (2011). Why grades engender performance-avoidance goals: The mediating role of autonomous motivation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(3), 683–700. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023911

4. Covington, M. V. (2000). Goal theory, motivation, and school achievement: An integrative review. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 171–200. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.51.1.171

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6. Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Educational Leadership, 69(3), 28–33.

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