The Effort Grade Debate: Motivation or Misleading?

If you were to walk into my school and ask about grades, you wouldn’t hear anything about A’s or B’s. We don’t use traditional letter grades. Instead, we report on progress toward mastery and on behaviors that support learning—things like engagement, collaboration, persistence, and readiness to learn. In certain domains, especially exploration, engineering activities, physical education, and performance-based arts, we also honor effort more explicitly.

This makes the “effort grade debate” very personal for me, because I live and teach in a system where effort is visible, acknowledged, and communicated—just not in a traditional way.

So What Are Effort Grades?

Effort grades (or behavior/participation indicators) typically aim to measure how hard a student is trying, how consistently they complete work, how they collaborate with peers, or how they engage in the learning process.

Depending on the classroom or school, effort grades may include:

• Preparedness

• Class participation

• Persistence

• Time on task

• Growth mindset behaviors

• Collaboration

• Homework completion

In my school, these show up as “behaviors that support learning.” They are intentionally separated from academic mastery so families can see both the “what” and the “how” of learning.

Why Effort Matters

There’s real value in acknowledging effort—especially for:

• students still developing skills,

• multilingual learners,

• neurodivergent students,

• students facing barriers outside of school, and

• areas where performance and practice overlap (arts, PE, engineering challenges).

Effort communicates something meaningful about a child’s habits, resilience, and engagement. Research also suggests that engagement is more nuanced than “raising your hand”—and teachers benefit from structured tools to observe it reliably (Waggett et al., 2020). That aligns with my experience: effort behaviors often give me early insight into a student’s confidence, mindset, or comprehension long before a summative assessment does.

But Effort Isn’t Mastery

Here’s where the debate gets complicated.

Effort is important—but it isn’t the same as:

• demonstrating a standard,

• meeting a performance expectation, or

• producing evidence of academic understanding.

This is why I appreciate the separation we use at my school. When effort and mastery get collapsed into a single grade, students and families lose clarity about what the child can actually do. Some students may earn high marks for trying hard even if they haven’t mastered the content. Others may demonstrate mastery easily but receive lower grades for inconsistent effort.

That blurring makes it harder for teachers to communicate progress accurately—and harder for students to know what they need to do next.

Where I Land

My stance is somewhere in the middle:

✔️ Effort matters, and it deserves space in our reporting systems.✔️ Mastery matters, and it must remain clearly defined and separate.✔️ Students benefit when they can see both how they’re learning and what they’re learning.✔️ Transparent rubrics and consistent criteria help maintain fairness.

In performance-heavy domains—like arts, engineering, or PE—effort rightly plays a much larger role. In academic areas, effort helps me guide instruction and support students, but it doesn’t replace standards-based evidence.

My Guiding Principle

At the end of the day, I want students to hear two things from me:

“I see how hard you’re trying.”“And here’s where your learning is right now.”

Separating effort from mastery allows me to honor both truths.And that balance helps students grow not just as learners, but as humans.

References

Waggett, R. J., Johnston, P., & Jones, L. B. (2020). Beyond simple participation: Providing a reliable informal assessment tool of student engagement for teachers. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 31(7), 737–757.