This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When you were in school, what stressed you out the most? For many students, classroom assessments—graded tests, quizzes, group work, presentations, labs and the like—would be near the top of the list.
Like decades of research before it, the research my students and I have been doing continues to show that classroom assessment is a persistent source of social pressure and general unhappiness for postsecondary students. This isn't to say that instructors and institutions aren't trying to address the problem. Two solutions seem to be common.
First, there have been many efforts to support student mental health on Canadian campuses, including national standards, institutional plans, counseling centers and crisis lines, to name a few. While helpful, these solutions often don't have the capacity to handle the problem. Second, when assessment is targeted more directly, the response often involves calls for particular forms of assessment, debates about ungrading or recommendations to minimize grades altogether.
As a case in point, headlines have been abuzz with news that the University of Michigan plans to make first-semester courses credit/non-credit for freshmen, with the hope that it will alleviate stress. But many of these decisions are outside the scope of most individual instructors. My research with my colleagues shows that even decisions instructors do control, like which format of assessment to use, may not matter very much to student well-being.
In other words, getting rid of specific types of assessment, or even grades, doesn't seem to guarantee improved student well-being. As a social psychologist who specializes in education, I decided to ask a different question. Knowing that students are completing assessments that compromise their well-being right now and that instructors have finite resources, what solutions might be borrowed from social psychology?
One option was clear to me. Instead of looking for a magic form of assessment that all students would agree supports their well-being, we could turn to robust psychological theories of well-being. Over the last five years, I have been using self-determination theory to guide the redesign of classroom assessments for postsecondary students.
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