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It's this author's firm belief 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 require rewards for their efforts as a motivating factor to assure that continued success and effort be achieved, and children are no different. Rewards, however, are only as good and effective as the value that the recipient holds for that reward. If the reward is valued low, the results will be low. If the reward is favored highly, motivation to achieve the rewarded goal will also be high.
Tutoring Reward Plan
Tutoring has been proven to be highly beneficial to the student with anticipated satisfaction for the parents. However, it's the student who has to do all the work. The parent is rewarded by their child's success. The tutor is rewarded usually with money. But the student has to rely solely on the success of achieving better grades, which as discussed, isn't much of a reward for a young child.
Consequently, to achieve greater success from tutoring, a reward plan should be established whereby the student gets a reward that the student conceives as rewarding to him or her. A tutoring reward plan helps motivate the student as well as give the child experience with obtaining real-life rewards for real-life efforts.
Studies suggest that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement in most behavior modification situations. Basically, positive reinforcement is a reward that's given out for favorable performance, and negative reinforcement is punishment or reward denial that's given out for unfavorable performance.
There are times, however, when negative reinforcement is necessary such as in situations where a child behaves contrary to what's expected of him or her. For example, rewarding a child for not making a total mess of the kitchen is not a good idea. The child will expect a reward every time he or she doesn't make a mess. In this case, negative reinforcement is the preferred method such as denying the child of something that he or she regards as favorable. If he or she makes a mess without cleaning up, he or she will be denied the trip to the zoo, or denied that new cell phone, for example.
Effort, however, is not something that is expected from children all the time, good behavior is, but strong effort from tutoring is something that needs to be encouraged and helped along the way, and positive reinforcement achieves that result.
