This analysis of data from the Partnership for Literacy Study investigates the relationship among achievement, effort, and grades. Certainly, grades reward achievement, the mastery of material by students. Research has also suggested that grades are used to reward students for exerting effort to learn material, even if students fall short of mastery. Indeed, some small-scale research has found that teachers reward students for merely cooperating with their instructional plans, for behaviors that may be weakly related or even unrelated to the growth in achievement. This analysis reveals that teachers seldom reward students for nonachievement-related behavior, for keeping instruction moving. In these data from middle school English and language arts classrooms, the vast majority of the variance in grades is accounted for by students' achievement and students' behaviors that are closely related to the growth in achievement. The findings are consistent with the theory that many teachers adopt a “developmental” perspective on instruction and seek to promote students' achievement by rewarding students' engagement.
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