Teachers measure their students` achievement through many ways. I believe teachers are grading the students` performance or achievements and not their efforts. 

Yes, in most of the cases , we are measuring their effort!!!

I come from a business background so my assessment is generally designed to reward outcomes.The exception is a consulting course where I guide teams of students through projects for different real-world clients. I meet each team bi-weekly. Half their grade depends on their preparation for and participation in these meetings - thus effort. The other half of their grade is based on their presentation and report to the client at the end - thus the final project outcome.

I personally agree with @MahfuzJudeh.  There is no way to assess students' efforts objectively and fairly as we are not around them 24/7. Besides,  if there was really an honest effort on their part, it should translate into good performance.  If honest effort does not translate into good performance (on a consistent basis), then the student is most likely on the wrong major, and had been misadvised by his/her career advisor. In that case, it is much better (and kinder / more humane!) to advice the student to change majors than to keep her/him in a major where he/she has very little or no chance of succeeding and/or contributing to society.  For example, a major in physics who has very little aptitude for the subject -- as assessed by consistently poor performance despite consistent honest effort -- is much better asked to transfer to law or art or film school where s/he has a chance to succeed and be happier as a person.   Unfortunately, I find that most departments would want to keep their majors simply because they want to avoid a decrease in enrollment and lower income in tuition and other course fees .........

Interesting question! For me, as a university lecturer, I  prefer to measure learners' efforts rather than their performance. their efforts are valued.

Tyler Curriculum Model is Evaluation Oriented. It places more value to evaluation especially to Achievement. To this, achievements is being graded and not efforts.

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/908-dear-student-no-i-won-t-change-the-grade-you-deserve

Currently we grade the competitive performance (against other students). See above link. Should we rather grade the self-improvement effort to encourage intellectual growth? See the link below. Then the published grade will be e.g., "mark for final" minus "mark for half year"! A sad side effect will then be that optimising students will loaf for the first half year!

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Smart-Praise-for-Students/230969

Vicente, Any grading of performance is a combination of ability + effort + efficacy. I think measuring 'effort' independently is very difficult. I don't believe it serves the lecturer/professor any great value..but is useful to help students understand their own behaviours in seeking improvement. As Ian said measuring improvement is another option. This is useful for developing efficacy early in an educational course but I am not sure of its value at university, where at some point in time a result for absolute performance is needed. My personal feeling is that both performance and improvement should be graded and effort should be at least considered for each student to develop a notion of personal control over one's future behaviours. For this to work effectively, students need clear counselling of the purpose of each measure and what they can do with it. I have been isolating a measure of effort for lower secondary school students for years and found it to be difficult to be accurate, but useful for counselling.

Vicente and Mahfuz, One can't grade effort in all situations true. However, one can grade the observables of effort. In the end, if the purpose of grading effort is advisory then it doesn't matter if it isn't 100% accurate. I've attached the effort grading system I use at high school. I am required to grade effort and behaviour so I devised my own criteria. These were intended to be advisory but I also used them school wide to create a 'Personal Best' report that focussed on effort and improvement.

@MarkGould  It is interesting to learn that you are actually required (I guess by your administrators) to grade student effort.  Do you sometimes find that to be quite time-consuming on your part, as each student has to be graded at least twice?  My feeling is that grading student effort may be appropriate in the elementary and perhaps middle school levels, but not in the high school and college levels (much more so in graduate school).  By the time a student reaches a certain age, say 15 or 16, he/she is expected to be a responsible young person already, and must take responsibility for his/her own behaviors.  Students at such age (or older) must be mature enough to realize that if one expends little or no effort on an endeavor, he/she cannot expect rewards (high grades).  In my (humble) opinion, grading student effort is assuming that all students are immature and irresponsible.   

@Vicente We are actually required to grade effort by the National system, not just local administrators. I agree completely with you about age. Australian High Schools run from age 12 to 16 so at high school we still work with many immature and irresponsible children. Even so, I'm not sure that grading effort is useful to the children. They may be immature and irresponsible at that age, but they aren't stupid. They are making reasoned choices.

Hi Vicente, to me, I would prefer Effort in high standard of learning.  From experience, student would because of the instructor awarding marks on performance will boycott  class for other activities but at the end of the course work you find them performing better than those in class 24/7.  Is the student so good to that level.  No, because there is no yard stick to measure what has gone wrong with student making effort to pass the course when already the class boycotter has find ways of getting himself through the work either by cheating or otherwise but because he was not caught his performance is use to judge others in the written paper.

In my country, at least,   this is getting minimize, because for any course work there is 75% score for attendance in class and I think this serve as grading effort of coming to class, also 75% score on assignment to be giving  to grade student effort in doing the work.  Before coming to final examination which I don't support as the true test of student academic performance.  In conclusion, You will agree with me that effort made in practical class determine the good result of the student,  gearing a better performance.  

To me grading effort brings about seriousness in class than clamoring on performance only.  Thanks.

Best regard,

Abimbola.