If your child brings home a poor assessment, there are some things you should never do. Some reactions may in fact make the situation worse and can lead to bigger problems. Parents should never: 1. Express anger, disappointment or other strong emotions about a bad mark or assessment. This will make the child feel bad and will encourage them to hide marks in the future. Children already feel bad about poor assessments, even if they don't show it. Strong emotions will only make them feel worse. 2. Ignore it. In some cases, a D or bad assessment is an isolated case and a child will do better next time. However, telling your child to ignore a problem is not the best way to help your child learn problem-solving skills. Ignoring the problem can also result in more poor grades, especially at the grade school level. Children need to learn one concept at a time. The child who does not learn to add properly, for example, will have a hard time learning later math concepts, and so will be more likely to get more poor assessments in the future. Early intervention and quick response are key to school success. 3. Blame the teacher. Even if you think that a teacher is unfair to your child, blaming the teacher for a bad mark only encourages your child to shift responsibility. Rather than talking ill of the teacher, help your child come up with practical things they can do to take control of their grades. 4. Praise your child for failure. Many parents inadvertently heap treats and attention on a child who brings home a poor grade or assessment, hoping to encourage the child or improve their mood. This can backfire if the child comes to equate failure with parental love or attention. Children who are praised too much for poor assessments may get the idea that school success is not important. 5. Make studying tedious or terrible. If you make extra study time boring or very long, your child may see it as a punishment, and feel worse about their bad mark. When trying to help your child study, make studying as fun as possible and break steady sessions up as much as possible. Twenty minutes each day practicing long division will generally go much further than a three-hour long tutoring session each Thursday. 6. Punish your child. Bad grades are the result of not learning something fast enough or of not understanding something. If you punish your child for this, you may discourage them from learning. 7. Make a huge situation out of the problem. If you keep asking your child about school, the marks, and the subject area he or she is having problems with, you can transfer your own worry to your child. Set aside one tutoring time during the day for extra help and confine questions to that time. That way, your child will not be left with the impression that one bad assessment is a disaster. 8. Leave your child out of the process. If you decide what needs to be done and impose schedules or solutions, your child may feel left out and may not feel part of the studying process. Worse, your child may not agree with your choices and may not do the work you set out. Your child will learn much more about problem solving - and will be far more likely to actually take the steps necessary to improve school performance - if you make your child part of the solution. 9. Study so much to improve one mark that all other grades slip, too. Make sure that you set aside enough time for your child to complete all the homework assigned. Concentrating too much in one subject area can cause serious problems. It may be useful to remind yourself why schools have assessments. Assessments are not meant to judge students and to make them feel bad - they are meant to show students how they are doing. Poor assessments are meant to be warnings that more work is needed. You will want to keep this in mind and remind your child of this as well. It is important that your child realizes that, with some work, grades can be improved - and that you as a parent are always there to help. |
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