TDNet Discover

The purpose of this quantitative study is to understand if students who have high grade motivation show more, less, or similiar willingness to utilize 21st Century Skills than their peers with low grade motivation demonstrate. If grade motivation is shown to negatively impact student proclivity to utilize 21st Century Skills in their study approaches, then long standing grading practices may need to be reconsiderd. The results of a survey in which 324 university students in Mexico were sampled using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionaire were made available to the public via a creative commons license. In this study, those results were analyzed utilizing the Kruskal-Willis test to determine if there are statistical differences in participants’ propensity to utilize the 21st Century Skills of creatvitiy, critical thinking, and collaboration in their study processes. Furthermore, anxiety levels and self-effiacy levels between students with high and low grade motivation were compared via anlysis of the MannWhitney U test to see if anxiety and self-efficacy contribute to the differences in 21st Century Skill proclivity. The researcher determined that students with high grade motivation show less proclivity to utilize creativity and collaboration, but exhibit much higher rates of anxiety than their peers with low grade motivation demonstrate. These results indicate that educators should continue to reconsider the efficacy and role of grading systems in a 21st Century education context and consider alternative assessment practices. Future research should examine the impact of grade motivation in younger learners as well as in learners from broader cultural contexts.