How To Measure Your Child’s Progress When Homeschooling
How easy is it to assess your homeschooled child? Even more, what systems are in place to check for progress? As of March 2021, an estimated 5 million kids received their education at home. It’s only logical that you’d want to know how well you’re doing with your child. For more details on this, please read further to find out.
Focus on actual progress and not percentage scores on a test
For many years, the education system has always equated high test and exam scores to student academic progress. Today, however, newly developed learning systems prove them otherwise. Education experts believe that a child’s academic progress is deeply rooted in quality and not quantity. Therefore, just because your child scored 60 percent in a test does not mean they failed to understand what they learned.
Indeed, children who receive these scores may berate themselves for not getting higher scores because they feel you expect more from them. However, when you communicate quality over quantity, they will understand not to feel too bad. This approach has been widely accepted by new teaching systems propagated by the Teach for America organization. If you’re unsure of their approach to teaching and learning, check out their Teach for America reviews for confirmation of their works.
Observe your kids’ learning process
How do your kids react when you’re having a homeschooling session? Do they pay rapt attention to you or seem distracted by another activity? Even better, do they ask questions relating to what you’re teaching? Indeed, these are effective indicators to assess or measure your child’s homeschooling progress. It’s expected that when children learn new things, the grasping of the concept taught automatically triggers questions in their young brains, which aid proper understanding.
Therefore, when your kid asks questions triggered by things they learned, it shows a significant cognitive function that students are expected to have. It’s why you are encouraged to accommodate their questions, no matter how many they are. Apart from this, you should also assess your children’s immediate reaction when they do not have an answer to a question you posed to them. Do they show signs of anxiety or immediately refer to a material or resource which contains the information? The latter is indicative of progress.
Let them apply knowledge to projects
Have you tried giving your homeschool kids projects to work on as a way to see how well they apply acquired knowledge to tasks? These projects should be fun, engaging, and created to build interest to satisfy their curiosity. The following are some engaging tasks to assess their progress:
- Map out a route for a road trip
- A recipe that requires them to measure ingredients for baking.
- Design a tool to carry out a task (for 12 year-olds and above)
In conclusion, efficient and effective knowledge application is an excellent way to confirm progress in your kids. Avoid relying solely on quizzes and tests to evaluate their cognitive functions. After all, teaching and learning must be fun for kids, depending on how you go about it.
