ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
Grades as motivators or stressors: The role of gender, cognitive ability and parental education
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
- 2Hogskolan Kristianstad, Kristianstad, Sweden
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Grades are expected to motivate students to perform well in school. However, the connection between grades and student motivation and achievement is not clear. Understanding the relations between grades and student motivation and achievement requires knowledge about students' experiences of being graded, which is underreported in research. This study uses large-scale data to investigate Swedish upper secondary school students' perceptions about how grades influence their motivation. Confirmatory factor analysis has been used to create two factors based on the students' perceptions of being affected by grades: 1) that grades evoke negative emotions and 2) that grades act as an external motivator. Structural equation modelling has been used to relate the factors to background variables (gender, cognitive ability, and parental education), as well as Grade Point Average. Results indicate that grades evoke negative emotions more often among female students, students with lower cognitive ability, and students with lower parental education. Students with higher parental education, as well as female students with higher cognitive ability and highly educated parents, are more likely to perceive that grades act as an external motivator. The results also indicate that the perception of grades evoking negative emotions is negatively related to achievement, whereas the perception that grades act as an external motivator is positively related to achievement.
Keywords: Achievement emotion, Grading, Motivation, studentperspective, Upper-secondary education
Received: 16 Oct 2025; Accepted: 03 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Liljeröd, Klapp and Jönsson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hampus Liljeröd
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.