Reinforcing Effort

I really like to let me students know that effort plays a major role in your overall success in any task whether it be social, sports or school related. In this last year I have developed a system in my classroom where students have to score their effort everyday in art and write down the daily objective. These objective or goal sheets are kept in their student folders and they are responsible for filling them out. My plan was to use them to help keep students focused on their work, more aware of their effort in art and to compare their grade/assessment score with their effort output. Last week was the first time I could really see if it was working and it was shocking to see the correlation between effort and excellence. Most of my students that gave themselves a high effort score did very well on their project (B or higher) whereas the students that didn't really care what they did in class ended up with a C or lower. The students that didn't do as well as they thought were encouraged to look at their self assessed effort scores in their folder. Most of the students saw the connection immediately and were rather embarrassed. There were a few students that didn't understand how their effort scores should have any impact on their final grade. I think that this concept might take more than a few minutes to explain. I will be excited to see if the few students that didn't put forth a great deal of effort in the last project will strive for more in the next one. I hope that they can begin to see the overall impact effort can have on a final outcome!