The Concept Of Mastery and Keeping Track of Progress
It’s a good idea to wait until your child has learned something really well before teaching the next step.
Nobody is Perfect
Now, what does it mean to say that a child has really learned a skill? First of all, it doesn’t mean that a child will do the skill every single time she is supposed to. What young child does what she’s supposed to, every single time? Not one we’ve ever met! But if a child does the skill most of the time when the situation calls for it, that means that she’s learned it well. We can’t expect 100% correct performance on any task. This is unrealistic. Most children would get bored and frustrated if we made them do the same few things, over and over again, never moving on to new things until they were responding correctly 100% of the time, never making any mistakes. And, this would require the child to pay close attention to you all the time, and frankly, that is also not realistic.
The Idea of Mastery
If your child can do something correctly on her own in at least 8 out of 10 tries, it shows that she has learned it well. We call this mastery. When a child can often perform a skill correctly, we say she has mastered it, at least during the special learning session. Later, we’ll discuss how important it is for the child to apply the same skill in many settings, with different people, using many materials and instructions. This is called generalization.
Keeping Track of Your Child’s Learning
It can be very helpful to keep a record of how well your child is learning a new skill. It is ideal if you have someone who can help you to keep track. That person can write down a plus sign (+) when your child gives a correct response without any help, a (P) when you prompt her, even if you give her only a tiny bit of help, and a minus sign (–) when she responds incorrectly or does not respond at all. This would help you to be very accurate in keeping track of how well your child is learning. There are many ways to keep track of your child’s responses. One way is as simple as writing tally marks on a piece of paper.
There are other ways to keep track. If you want some more suggestions to see which one you like best, click here!