Tutors Rewarding Pupils For Terrific Effort Reach Better Results

It's this author's firm opinion that young students should be given rewards for their academic efforts during tutoring, and not solely rely on receiving good grades from their teachers as their only means of reward. Adults receive rewards for their efforts primarily in the way of money to assure their effort will be continued, and youngsters need a similar type of stimulus to assure that their academic success will also be continued. Rewards, however, are only as good and effective as the value that the recipient holds for that reward. When the reward has little value to the recipient, effort will be minimal. When the reward, however, has significant value to the recipient, effort will be high.

Tutoring Reward Plan

Tutoring has been proven to be highly beneficial to the pupil with anticipated satisfaction for the parents. However, it's the student who has to do all the work. The tutor is rewarded with money, and the parents are rewarded with their youngster's success. The pupil, on the other hand, has little to motivate his or her efforts except for receiving better grades which is often not highly valued by a young kid.

Consequently, to obtain greater success from tutoring, a reward plan should be established whereby the pupil gets a reward that the student conceives as rewarding to him or her. Not only does the reward motivate the pupil to accomplish better academic results, but it also gives the student experience with obtaining rewards for excellence.

Studies propose that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement in most behavior modification situations. Positive reinforcement is used as a reward to motivate an individual to perform some favorable task, and negative reinforcement is punishment to prevent an individual in performing some unfavorable task.

There are times, however, when negative reinforcement is necessary like in situations where a youngster behaves against what's expected of him or her. Rewarding a child for not making a wreck of the kitchen, for example, is not appropriate. The youngster will expect a reward every time he or she makes a wreck. In this case, negative reinforcement is the preferred method such as denying the child of something that he or she regards as favorable. For example, not cleaning up after making a clutter in the kitchen could result to being denied something that the child holds as being very valuable such as being denied a long awaited trip or being denied a sleep over at a friend's house.

Effort, however, is not something that is expected from youngsters all the time, good behavior is, but effort is something that needs to be reinforced and helped along the way, and positive reinforcement while tutoring acquires that result.

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John Chartrand, founder of Ottawa Tutors and Ottawa Robotics Academy in Ottawa, is a certified Ontario teacher with 15 years teaching experience. Read other great articles by visiting John's website: http://ottawatutors.org
Ottawa Tutors
12 Panama Avenue
Ottawa On K2H 7R2
(613) 265-6446

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