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Old December 6th 07, 08:49 PM posted to misc.kids
Penny Gaines[_2_]
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Posts: 124
Default Rewarding good or "not bad"

Beliavsky wrote:
On Dec 6, 7:03 am, Penny Gaines wrote:

[snip]
The difficulty with not rewarding academic results is that doing well
academically is not necessarily obvious to the child. Sporting
achievements are obvious, because you can see the other kids doing
stuff, but you don't necessarily see that another child is getting
crosses against most (or some!) of their maths answers .


My wife tells me that in Indian schools, class ranks based on exams
are kept from the earliest grades, and such ranks appear on the report
cards sent to parents. Academic rank can be made just as clear as
athletic rank if the school wants that. As a parent I think I would,
although I would also want to know how my kids do on standardized
achievment tests given to students throughout the state (and ideally
throughout the country).

[snip]

There is a difference between the school informing the parents about
relative progress, and the children seeing academic differences themselves.

Certainly, parents are informed about how their child is doing, and both
national scores and local scores. The information the parent is getting
is not an issue in the UK.

But the child doesn't see that. If their maths exercise book is full of
ticks, it is easy for them to assume that other children are also
getting almost every sum right, and if their work does not have much in
the way of spelling correction, it is also easy for them to assume
no-one else has many corrections either.

--
Penny Gaines
UK mum to three