To think its difficult to tell how much effort someone is making

[IfIonlyhadsomesleep]

That really. We're supposed to reward effort, but how do you know how much effort someone is really making. I went through my school career getting excellent effort grades in subjects I was good at and could achieve in with ease. The one thing I got rubbish effort grades in, I tried really, really hard at but was rubbish at and so it didn't show.

I don't think it's even very easy to know yourself. Do you ever feel as if you're not working properly, you wish you were concentrating harder ... but actually you are working fucking hard, you're just dissatisfied with the results?

I think I know what you mean. I feel that daily when parenting, tbh. Huge effort when I always get to the end of the day deri g I've done badly.

I am sure you haven't!

That's a sidetrack really! Not usually, and I've trained myself to know it!

I think it's easy to know how much effort my kids are putting into things. More difficult with others.

I generally have been praised for effort and achievement. I'm actually very lazy and worked out early how to get max results for minimum effort - I also stayed well away from anything too intellectuallly difficult. I am naturally numerate and quite even handed (in rl) so I started a new career in HR. Taking into account the pay bill and the fact that a lot of people in HR don't do numbers it really isn't hard to make a measurable impact with an excel spreadsheet

I can tell with my own kids, how much effort they are putting in
I think a good teacher could/should be able to?

It ought not to be difficult to tell - but it sometimes is.

When I was at school (25 years ago!) I got As for achievement and 5s for effort (very bad!) At the time, I thought thought this was cool, but now I am extremely ashamed!

And now I have drunk too much wine to stop my kindle autocorrect thingy repeating words for me - so early promise clearly going to the dogs

LRDfeministdragon you are clearly a perfectionist

Effort grades on school reports are utterly worthless; worse than useless, in fact.

I wrote my thesis on effort grades, and I think they are a Bad Thing. I would be wary of relying on them to give an accurate picture of a child's progress, as they are for the main part, completely arbitrary.

Effort is impossible to accurately measure, and to grade it is absurd. One person cannot possibly know how much effort another is making in any given task. The marks at best are meaningless, at worse they communicate a very negative message- effort grades are often used as 'compensation' for low attainment grades, and teachers can unwittingly communicate the message "However hard you try, you will only ever be average" by giving a low attainment grade paired with a high effort grade; ironically when they are trying to communicate exactly the opposite.

Load of old bollocks, they are.

Interesting tethers!

I'm not sure what I think about them really, especially for younger children who are more likely to have learning difficulties that haven't been picked up yet.

Maybe we could get students to grade themselves for effort?

Might be interesting...

Yes, I agree with you, OP. When my ds was in secondary school I felt that in subjects where he did well, the teachers thought he worked hard and had supportive parents, but in the subjects where he really struggled, they thought he didn't try hard enough and I got the impression they thought I was a lazy parent with no interest in my ds doing well. Whereas I knew that his A grade in X was achieved with less effort than his D grade in Y, simply because he found X easy and really struggled with Y. He really struggled with Maths and was constantly made to feel he had a bad attitude towards it and should change his attitude to get a C+ GCSE grade, but once he moved on to college and retook Maths, he was encouraged and praised and told he could do it and finally got the grade and it was great for his confidence.

I don't know why the teachers couldn't see that high achievement doesn't always equal high effort and low achievement doesn't always equal low effort.