2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Do grades matter? What do grades mean or represent? Ways to rank students and describe academic performance have been used in practice since at least the early eighteenth century. Over time, educators have begun to consider whether grades - in their various forms, numeric or otherwise - sufficiently represent how well students learned, and explore what grades really mean. The impact of grades on student motivation, self-efficacy, and identity, among other constructs, has also been a subject of interest. In Engineering, these constructs are important to consider as they may impact student persistence, success, and diversity.

This scoping review explores current literature on the use of grades and their impact on students - specifically from students’ perspectives. How do students describe grades and their experiences with prevailing grading practices and assessment strategies, as documented in literature? What meaning do students ascribe to grades, and how does this meaning making impact their motivation, self-esteem, and identity? Ultimately, the results of this literature review will serve as the basis for developing strategies to ensure that students are able to thrive in a learning environment where the focus is on learning, going beyond numeric or similar representations of academic performance.

To answer the questions posed above, we are conducting a scoping review of literature on students’ perceptions of grades. We are using a broad search parameter that may yield literature from both K-12 and higher education spaces in order to establish the general conversation on grades from students’ perspectives. We followed Arksey & O’Malley’s (2005) five-stage framework for conducting scoping literature reviews as a methodology to identify possibly relevant articles and filter through which answer our research question to include in our analysis. Two researchers conducted the analysis, and all decisions and observations were documented in a shared repository to ensure quality, trustworthiness, and replicability.
This scoping review will provide a deeper insight into students’ perceptions of the grading systems they are assessed within and the meanings that they ascribe to grades through the review and summary of literature on the topic of grades through student lenses. The insights from this scoping review will allow faculty to better understand how students may be experiencing learning environments in which grades are assigned, and subsequently intentionally designing curriculum and pedagogy to improve students’ learning experiences and environments.