Bright child, not good at exams

[Franny1]

Do people think it's fairly common for seven year olds to not yet be good at exams? Mine (year 3) seems bright to me and gets great reports but in first proper exams has performed (god, I hate that word!) below what we and teachers would have expected...

She's so young for the year and I feel instinctively like at this age surely some of it's just maturity/concentration?!

Exam stress
Many a child ( and adult) doesn’t fulfil their potential in exams
It’s very sad that our lives are so reliant on them

Suggest you look at ways to reduce the stress

I was like this . Very frustrating as I know I did not reach my full potential. Is there any info out there to prepare her for exams ? It is definitely a horrible way to judge people on one performance on one day . Unfortunately this is the time honoured way we deal with education.

Disclaimer that I have had no contact with school systems for a few years - but do 7 year olds actually do exams? Does your DD enjoy school and are you happy with the school that she goes to if it has such a focus?

I mean maybe I can help with stress/exam prep yes. BUT at this stage I am fr more interested in whether this might be a young person thing. She is only seven! And I feel like there are other areas where I see her behind her peers BUT once she gets there she really gets there.

Eg quite a few of her friends have been happily reading for a while. And while she's a technically good reader she has long shown no interest at all in picking up a book herself for pleasure - and then in the last few months she has started to do is and is now really into it. She was slow to get there but now that she's there she has caught up and and is loving it! Seemed like a maturity thing to me. Other examples too...

Bump 🙂

Exams, at 7???

exams?

Or is she doing in class tests?

I never grew out of my exam stress. I was always well prepared, etc but was so nervous because I wanted to do well.

I saw it so often when I taught in higher education as well, often the young women but not exclusively. If you can find coping strategies to help your daughter try to deal with it now at a young age, I definitely think that would be a good idea.

She will get the hang of it. Is she bothered/motivated? My son certainly wasn’t to start with and always ‘forgot’ to read over his spelling tests when given time at the end to spot obvious mistakes (like getting distracted half way through a word and not finishing it). Honestly I was quite worried at first, but he’s got so much better.

Lol, this is just the type of things she does and just the sort of story/reassurance I guess I was hoping for. Thank you! One of the difficulties is that the exam system they use is on the computer and moves on automatically after each question, so they can't go back and check at the end. And it's multiple choice answers so makes it really easy to just click and run. So I'm really trying to encourage her to slow down and check AT THE TIME.

Since I wrote this post we actually did a little version of a similar test at home and I really noticed that she made really dumb mistakes where she definitely does actually know the answer, so not complex inference of anything (eg what colour is the X, when the colour is written clearly in the text, and she's just rushed it and chosen a totally different colour from the options).

Assessments two out of three terms from year 3. I also think it's sort of ridiculous but it's becoming more and more common I think.