Grading Participation & Behavior

Share / assign

Why it works

Ask a group of teachers what a course grade means and you will get strikingly different answers, and that is the problem. In many gradebooks a single letter blends together achievement (what the student learned) with a grab-bag of other things: participation, effort, class behavior, homework completion, neatness, punctuality of submission, extra credit, and compliance. The researchers who study grading, among them Thomas Guskey and Susan Brookhart, argue that this blending makes the grade nearly uninterpretable: a B might mean solid understanding, or weak understanding propped up by diligence and good behavior, or strong understanding dragged down by missing homework, and nobody, not the student, the family, or the next teacher, can tell which. The core recommendation is to first decide what a grade is supposed to mean, and then make it mean that consistently. Most of this research lands on the position that the academic grade should represent achievement, the student's proficiency against the learning goals, as cleanly as possible, because that is the information a grade is uniquely able to carry and the information everyone assumes it carries. That does not mean participation, effort, and behavior do not matter; it means they are different information and should be reported separately rather than mixed into the achievement grade, where they distort it. Separating them has two payoffs. The achievement grade becomes honest and interpretable: it actually tells you what the student knows and can do. And the behaviors become more visible and useful, because reporting work habits, effort, and participation on their own channel lets a teacher say something clear about them (and intervene) instead of burying them in a number. The research also flags the equity stakes: behavior and compliance components tend to reward students whose circumstances make school easy to comply with and penalize those whose do not, so blending them into the grade can widen gaps for reasons that have nothing to do with learning. The workshop has teachers examine their own gradebook categories, decide what their grade should mean, and build a clean separation between the achievement grade and the behaviors they still want to track.

The research: Guskey, T. & Brookhart, S. On grading, reporting, and what grades should mean.

The run-of-show

Choose your slot. The agenda, timings, and length update to match.

The core activity: decide what the grade means and separate out behavior

The heart of the session is auditing your gradebook and building a clean line between the achievement grade and the behaviors you track.

Decide first what a grade is supposed to mean; most research lands on achievement against the learning goals.
Audit what currently goes into the grade and mark each component as achievement or behavior.
Pull participation, effort, compliance, and neatness out of the achievement grade so it stays interpretable.
Report the behaviors on their own channel so they are valued and visible without distorting the grade.

A grade should mean what the student learnedBlend in participation, effort, and compliance and the grade stops meaning proficiency and starts meaning how well a student played school. Grade achievement cleanly; report behaviors separately where they can still matter.

Facilitator notes

The test of a good grade is interpretability: can the student, the family, and the next teacher tell what it means? A blended grade fails it.
Separating is not dismissing; behaviors still matter and are often more useful reported on their own than buried in a number.
Name the equity stakes: compliance components reward students whose circumstances make school easy to comply with.

Behaviors matter, so report them honestlyPulling effort and participation out of the grade lets you say something clear about them and act on it, instead of letting them silently distort what the achievement grade is supposed to say.

Adapt it

Elementary: use a separate work-habits section so effort and behavior are reported, not graded.
Secondary: decide a department-wide meaning for the grade so a B means the same across sections.
Any setting: communicate the change to families; a grade that suddenly means only achievement needs explaining.

Participant handout

One page for every teacher. Print it, or save it as a PDF.

K12 Academics · Professional Learning

Grading Participation & Behavior: decide, separate, report

Decide what the grade should mean and keep behaviors out of it, reporting participation, effort, and compliance separately.

What I have decided my grade should mean:
Things currently in my grade that are behavior, not achievement:
How I will report those behaviors separately:
An equity concern in my current grading I need to fix:
How I will explain the change to students and families:

Make it stick

A clean grade holds only if the separation is maintained. Close by setting the follow-up:

Name a check-in: does your grade now report achievement, with behaviors reported separately?
Bring one gradebook category you reclassified.
Watch for behaviors creeping back into the achievement grade.

Common questions

If I take participation out of the grade, won't students stop participating?

It is a real worry, and the answer is to make participation matter without making it part of the achievement grade. Report it separately and visibly, talk about it, involve families, and build classroom conditions that make participation worthwhile in its own right. The evidence suggests that using the grade as the lever for participation mostly produces compliance rather than genuine engagement, and it comes at the cost of making the grade uninterpretable. Most teachers who separate the two find participation holds up when it is valued directly rather than bribed through points.

Doesn't effort deserve to count for something?

Effort matters enormously, which is exactly why it deserves to be reported clearly rather than blended invisibly into an achievement grade where nobody can see it. The problem with counting effort in the grade is twofold: it makes the grade mean two different things at once, and effort is hard to measure fairly, so it tends to reward students who perform visible diligence. Reporting effort and work habits on their own channel lets you recognize and respond to them honestly, and it keeps the achievement grade telling the truth about what the student learned.

Isn't this just a philosophical debate with no practical difference?

It has a very practical difference: the interpretability of every grade you give. When achievement and behavior are blended, a B is genuinely ambiguous, and students, families, and the next teacher all have to guess what it means, which undermines the grade's whole purpose of communicating. Separating them makes the grade say something true and usable. It also has concrete equity consequences, because compliance and behavior components systematically advantage students whose circumstances make school easy to comply with, so the choice of what to put in the grade is not abstract at all.