BEYOND PERFORMANCE
What students mean when they talk about effort
Last year, while serving on the Teaching Evaluation Committee at the business school where I work, I asked a professorship candidate after his teaching demonstration how he took effort into account when assessing student learning. After a thoughtful pause, he replied with a counter-question: “Is it fair to reward effort?”
His response wasn’t surprising. After all, assessment practices in educational institutions typically tend to prioritise performance over process. Nevertheless, I still found myself somewhat taken aback by his answer. Partly this was because I recognise effort as an essential component of the growth mindset that informs my own teaching. More importantly, each year I encounter students who feel that their grades do not fully reflect the effort they have invested in their learning.
Curious about how students themselves understand effort, I conducted a small survey throughout the academic year of 2025-2026. With the assistance of my colleagues, 234 students responded to three simple questions:
i) How do you define effort?
ii) What kind of effort have you put into this course?
iii) What colour do you associate with effort?
The first two questions elicited largely verbal descriptions while the colour associations often enriched and reinforced students’ understandings of effort.
What effort looks like to students
Although the responses varied considerably, three broad understandings emerged, reflecting how students understand why they invest effort, how they enact it, and how they experience it.
The first reflected what I came to think of as a 'growth orientation'. Students described effort as something that contributes to learning, positive outcomes and development (e.g., "When I put in effort something good comes out of it."). These responses were particularly common among students who selected green as the colour that symbolizes effort (e.g., "Green represents growth and a positive final outcome."). The second understanding centred on 'sustained engagement'. Here, effort was seen as disciplined use of personal resources such as concentration and persistence. Students who described effort in this way frequently associated it with blue (e.g., "A calm and bright colour that means trying consistently") and sometimes also with red, orange or yellow (e.g., "Red represents hard work for me."). The third understanding underscored 'personal meaning'. Rather than emphasising outcomes or specific behaviours, these students described effort as an ongoing process of aligning their motivation, perseverance and values. In this view, effort was not something one expended but something one experienced as personally significant (e.g., "Effort is a combination of things that come from the heart."). Mixed-colour imagery appeared frequently, often reflecting the idea that effort is less a measurable input than a personally meaningful process (e.g., "Colours mixed in the right way for me.").
Taken together, these findings suggest that students understand effort in ways that extend beyond its visible outcomes. While educators and educational institutions often encounter effort through grades and other measurable achievements, students see it as something that gives learning direction. For these students, effort is not merely a route to achievement but an integral part of the learning experience.
One further observation
One additional pattern reinforces this interpretation. Students tended to define effort as an internal state, yet described the effort they had invested in the course primarily through observable actions, such as attending classes, participating in discussions and completing assignments. At the same time, relatively few defined effort in terms of the amount of time spent studying or the number of hours invested. Instead, their responses consistently emphasised the quality of their engagement – concentrating, persisting and remaining committed to the learning process. This suggests that students understand effort as something that originates within them but becomes noticeable in how they they engage with learning. In this sense, effort functions as an internal compass that guides their learning, rather than simply a means of achieving external outcomes. It may also help explain why students often feel frustrated when the effort they experience is not fully reflected in the work through which their learning is assessed.
What students may really be saying
Reflecting on these findings, I have come to think that effort may function as a proxy for something larger. On closer inspection, what students describe as effort often appears to be a form of engagement, and beneath that engagement lies a sense of agency – a recognition that learning requires something from them. In the business school where I work, there is frequent discussion about the need for students to take responsibility for their learning. Based on this survey, it would seem that many of our students already understand - and act on - this responsibility.
The challenge, perhaps, is not that students fail to engage with learning, but that we often fail to recognise their engagement because it does not neatly align with the performance indicators through which educational success is measured. This may point to one of the central tensions within contemporary higher education. Assessment systems are designed to compare outcomes across large numbers of students, while learning itself is experienced by individuals, each following their own trajectory of development.
This brings me back to the original question of fairness and what we value in students and studying. If we expect students to be active participants in their own learning, the educational dilemma is not simply whether effort should be rewarded, but whether our assessment systems adequately recognise the forms of engagement through which learning occurs. This does not mean abandoning standards or replacing achievement with effort. Rather, it means acknowledging that education is not simply the production of measurable outcomes but a relationship with the self in which students actively participate in becoming.
This may be one of the obstacles facing higher education in the years ahead. In a world where knowledge is increasingly accessible, abundant and perhaps even becoming redundant, the value of education may lie less in what students know than in recognising the distinctly human processes through which they can learn, create meaning and evolve as individuals. In this sense, students’ descriptions of effort invite us to look beyond performance alone and pay closer attention to these procesess through which learning takes place.
Personally, I am beginning to lean towards the thought that maybe it is time for us, as educators and higher education institutions, to recognise that we can learn something about learning from our students – and that this learning of ours may require something from us.
By Taija Townsend
References
Curran, T., Hill, A. amd Pose, P. (2026). Perfectionism is accelaring over time: A cross-temporal analytic review of 35 years of college student data. Psychological Bulletin. 152(3): 255-287
David, L., Biwer, F., Baars, M., Wijnia, L., Paas, F., and de Bruin. A., (2024). The relation between perceived mental effort, monitoring judgments, and learning outcomes: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36, 66. https://doi.org/10.1997/s10648-024-09903-z
Dewey, J. (1913). Interest and effort in education. Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset. The new psychology of success. Ballantine Books
Kehle. L. and Urhahne, D. (2025). Interest and effort in learning and performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 593-611. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.700.40
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