does your child perform better when put under pressure

[meninblack]

My child seems to perform better when put under pressure for example in class he might take forever to finish a small piece of work, in a test situation he seems to be able to complete all the questions. This is o.k but it always seems as though he doesn't show what he is really capable of because he takes so long to do anything.

this is very common among boys - ds1 did entrance exams for a couple of selective independent schools in Y5 - he hadn't been tutored and the only practice we did was let him have a look at a past paper the week before - the practice paper was disastrous and we were in two minds as to whether or not to pull him out of the exams as we thought he was bound to do abysmally - however, with the pressure of the test situation he managed to pull all the stops out, passed with flying colours and even got a scholarship at one of the schools

the time when it gets really tricky is when they have to start producing large amounts of assessed course work for GCSEs - but I'm hoping the exam format will have been changed again by the time ds1 gets to that stage as it's recognised that it disadvantages boys compared to girls