Need help regarding scoreboards and motivation in an educational coure


Hello everyone,
My company develops an online course with different activities, for JH students. Does anyone know what is the best way to visualize all of students’ scores/grades in order to motivate them?
It would be great if you have an example of a good scoreboard for that?
Thank you,


Greetings Sarit,

By JH do you mean junior high? i.e. what age group are we looking at? and any particular locations/cultures?

First question I kinda want to ask is, is this the best way to motivate the students, is this a solution before actually digging into the problem? What is the problem you are trying to solve?

One thing with motivation that tends to be a hot topic is gamification and social proof. For gamification you want to research and look into ways that you can make the students want to achieve better results. Some ways you can do this is either having some kind of reward or by using social proof (which may or may not be a good idea in this case). When you turn to the social aspect you often use other people’s achievements in order to motivate, so for instance, your friends got … or the top person in your class got an A, 10 more points and you would have reached the same score!

Another way you could look at it is by figuring out where the student fell down, and offering them information or help in those particular areas in order to build them up again as part of those score cards.

It would be good if you could actually ask the students some questions around this. I.e. come up with some options and see what the students think. Because of the age group, and depending on their willingness it might be a bit difficult to get answers to what motivates them to achieve good results. Maybe spinning it around to how your company can help them achieve great results?

You could go as far as to look at the content and how it is being presented, and the pedagogy. Some people learn better with videos, others with text, others with small interactive quizzes. Do the courses themselves actually cater to a good source of information and learning environment?


Hi Natalie,
Thank you very much for your reply.
The course will be taught in the USA and the students are 15 years old.
The question is more what is the best way to present the students’ grades in order to motivate them? a graph, a scale or something else?
Thanks again,