Remember that knot in your stomach before a big test? For many students, graded quizzes, presentations and labs are a constant source of dread. Decades of research, including work by Canadian social psychologist David Benoît Godin and his students, keep showing the same thing: classroom assessment is a major driver of stress and unhappiness for postsecondary students.
But here's the twist. Simply getting rid of grades, or swapping one test format for another, may not actually make students feel better. Even the University of Michigan's bold plan to make first-semester courses pass/fail for freshmen, meant to ease pressure, tackles a problem most instructors can't control. Godin, who specializes in the psychology of education, wanted to ask a different question: What if we kept the assessments but made them kinder?
His answer draws on a well-tested idea from social psychology called self-determination theory. The theory says every human has three basic psychological needs: autonomy, or feeling in control; competence, or feeling capable; and relatedness, or feeling connected to others. When those needs are met, people flourish. When they aren't, people suffer.
For five years, Godin has been testing what happens when instructors weave these ideas directly into their tests and assignments. He calls the result "need-supportive features"—simple, concrete practices that quietly tell students their needs matter.
The four features are deceptively simple: handing students a test blueprint so they know what's coming, grouping questions to match that blueprint, adding brief encouraging messages at the start and end of the test, and giving students a real chance to offer feedback on the experience.
It sounds almost too easy. But the results, published across a series of studies, are striking. In two studies on multiple-choice tests—arguably the most hated format of all—adding the four features boosted how much students felt the test supported their needs. Their performance went up too.
Then the team went bigger. Working closely with one college instructor, they rebuilt her entire assessment plan for an undergraduate literacy course, adapting the multiple-choice tests, written assignments and the overall structure. The pattern held: students reported feeling more supported, saw the assessments as higher quality and fairer, and felt significantly less anger, hopelessness and anxiety.
Godin is careful not to oversell it. These changes are "evidence-based choices," not a magic cure for student stress. And they matter because the usual fixes—more counseling centers, crisis lines and campus mental-health plans—often lack the capacity to keep up with the scale of the problem.
What's hopeful is that any instructor can borrow these ideas starting next semester, no policy committee required. By meeting students' basic human needs inside the very moments that stress them most, we might turn the worst part of school into something that supports them. That's a small change with the power to reshape how a whole generation feels about learning.