Emphasizing Grades and Aversive Control

In an attempt to raise the level of intrinsic motivation, I have experimented with de-emphasizing grades in a previous course, and I am using part of that strategy in my general chemistry course this semester. I am also reducing the contribution of exam grades to the course grade; also an experiment.

Jack Michael thinks one should do the opposite, although he restricts his suggestions to courses with more than 40 students, introductory-content-heavy, and aimed at first and second year students. In a provocative article from 25 years ago, he argues that “effective college teaching is a form of aversive control, but if done properly the aversiveness is quite mild, and such aversive control can be responsible for the development of large and valuable intellectual repertoires.” That’s the last sentence of the article abstract, shown in full in the picture below along with source information.

I rarely have over 40 students in a class even at the introductory level, so maybe none of this applies to me. However, while I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the article, Professor Michael makes some incisive and insightful points in his paper. It is well worth reading in full, and I will simply highlight a few things that jumped out at me.

The first is his view of the introductory-content-heavy “grunt” courses. He writes: “I know that some professors and some students consider such courses to be necessary evils, at best, brought on by mass education, but I don’t share that view. This type of course, when it generates effective study, is responsible for a great deal of learning.” The key argument that Michael makes is that for many areas, particular in the sciences and courses leading to particular professions, having an extensive knowledge base is crucial. Creativity and innovation flow from this base – and the student learns from the professor (the professional in his or her field) how the expert talks and thinks about such material. As a chemist, I am inclined to strongly agree – I’ve started to entertain the idea of teaching a one-credit-hour seminar on the deep structure of chemistry. Maybe that will be my next summer project.

A chunk of the article discusses student motivation. The author anticipates many of the arguments one would make about the different sources of motivation. Intrinsic motivation – the joy of learning for its own sake – which is what we would ideally want all our learners to have, unfortunately plays a very small role and tends to be limited to a very narrow band of students. Our accelerating milieu coupled with a range of competing interests demanding the attention of our students, pushes students away from putting in the time and effort needed in a college-level course. Even “long-range payoffs suffer from the same susceptibility to postponement… this type of motivator [doesn’t] play any appreciable role in maintaining daily and weekly study”.

What works? Michael’s answer: Grades. He calls it “the one motivational factor over which the instructor has considerable control, and which is easily related to the details of the study assignment. It is also a factor of considerable strength, as evidenced by the intensity of study activity occurring immediately before a major exam.”

This brings me to the Procrastination Scallop. I had read about this in a different article that then referenced Jack Michael’s paper and led me to it in the first place. His paper has only one diagram – and it’s excellent! I should show it to my students.

He then goes into detail about how one should structure exams, how often, how much weight they should be given, the importance of clarity, the link to out-of-class study, and the relationship between student mastery and grades. He does weekly exams – I’m not sure I could do that, although I tend to give more exams than most. He also thinks that these exams should contribute significantly to the course grade. That’s what I’ve done in most of my classes (except for the experiment I’m trying this semester), which now seems rather “old school” given newer, trendier approaches. But perhaps there is something worthwhile about the old-school method. It’s something for me to mull over at length.

I close this post with Michael’s debunking of three popular notions in his conclusion. These notions are:

·      If you teach properly the students will find learning both fun and easy.

·      Grades should not be emphasized.

·      Good teaching consists primarily of good lecturing.

You’ll have to read his article to find out why he thinks these are bad for the types of courses he is considering (see second paragraph of this post). His final few sentences are poignant. “Perhaps in a more general sense it would be useful to conclude as follows: The world runs on fear. College learning is largely under aversive control, and it is our task to make such control effective, in which case it becomes a form of gentle persuasion.”

The author doesn’t try to fight the system but operate as best within it. Can we get out of the cycle of aversive control that is lodged into a much larger system? That will require more than a summer project of thought.