Student Target Grades - Why?

Since our last blog post focussing on Intrinsic Motivation, we have been talking to schools about how we can make our school systems more supportive to increasing this type of motivation. We will, through time, address many of the outcomes, however the one which came up time and again and the one which I want to throw out there today is all to do with Target Grades.



As it stands, a young person will enter secondary school in Year 7 and based on their performance at KS2, their sex, where they live, how much money their parents earn and whether they fit into any other grouping, they can be given their target grades for the end of KS4. Granted, most schools will wait until KS3 is over before revealing this information but they still give them another set of target grades for this key stage. We are all aware of the reasons why target grades exist, and we are told we must share these with our students, but has anyone reviewed whether or not they drive up student performance? Has anyone asked whether or not students find them useful? Lets look at it from a different angle.


There is a lot of talk within education that we need to make our students more independent when in comes to learning and in a lot of cases we need to remove their complacency towards learning. There is also talk about fixed and expansive mindsets, based on the work of Carol Dweck, and that we need to encourage more of the latter. We say all of these things yet put in place systems which make it very difficult for our young people to be all of these things.


Based on this theory, we have to ask, are target grades one of these systems? After all if we are sharing target grades we are setting performance based goals. If so does this not convey the idea to our young people that brain power is fixed? The exact opposite to the idea which we want to convey to them. Is it time we set our young people learning goals.....the idea that someone takes French to be able to speak the language and every aspect of feedback they get relates directly to language development, rather than how to get their target of a Grade B. Daniel Pink writes about Mastery in his book Drive....how can we intrinsically motivate our young people if we are removing the art of mastery, which is an idea that you will want to get better at something if it matters to you. As educators removing target grades could be one way of saying to our young people, there is no limit, you can keep learning for as long as you want to and as long as you keep pursuing your learning based goal, you will most definitely be learning.