Giving Compass' Take:

• Elliot Ransom explains that grades are a strong indicator of student success, but classroom environment contributes significantly to grades. 

• What support do educators in your community need to create better classroom environments? 

• Read an arguments for students' grades reflecting mastery, not effort. 

What do grades actually measure? New research shows that grades — earning that B-minus in algebra, A in English or C in chemistry — measure something beyond students’ academic skills. Indeed, grades could be a measure of the social-emotional environment that teachers create. Research now shows that grades reflect students’ mindsets and learning strategies, and that the mindsets and strategies that impact students’ learning and grades are influenced by the conditions of their classrooms — the environments surrounding students on a daily basis.

We’ve always known that the same students can get very different grades as they take different courses or subjects, change grade levels or switch to a different school. The explanations have traditionally included the students’ own subject preferences and social distractions. However, research finds that students’ achievement across classes, subjects or grade levels is strongly linked to the mindsets and strategies fostered by their teachers. This means that what teachers do and say in their classrooms has a strong influence on how students experience school, their perceptions of themselves and the effort they put into their work.

This suggests that if teachers can cultivate the right classroom conditions, they can promote strong academic mindsets and learning strategies in their students that contribute to strong classroom performance. A new student survey called Cultivate from UChicago Impact, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, is designed to help teachers examine how the learning environments they create support students’ social, emotional and academic development — whether the conditions in their classrooms contribute to students’ development of the academic mindsets and learning strategies linked to higher grades.

A deeper dive into what teacher support means, however, highlighted for me that to truly support students in deep and meaningful ways, teachers must attend to things such as:

  • Helping students understand what went wrong when they made a mistake;
  • Emphasizing that it is OK to make mistakes so they can learn from them; and
  • Letting students know that it is more important to try than to get things right the first time.

Read the full article about how to make grades reflect students by Elliot Ransom at The 74.