Most parents instinctively praise good results, and celebrating them is fine. But if results are the only thing you notice, your child can learn that the mark matters more than the work behind it.
IGCSE Accounting improves steadily through practice, so the work is where progress happens. This page explains why rewarding effort can motivate better than rewarding grades alone, and how to do it.
Why effort matters more than the mark
A grade is a snapshot of one moment. It depends on things your child cannot fully control, such as the particular questions, the day or a moment of nerves.
Effort is fully in their control. When you reward effort, you reward something your child can choose to repeat.
Praise persistence, extra practice and willingness to tackle a hard topic, and you encourage the habits that lead to good results. Praise only the outcome, and your child is left guessing how to repeat it.
This suits accounting well because it builds on itself. A student who understands double entry (recording every transaction twice, once on each side) finds the trial balance easier.
A student comfortable with the trial balance finds adjustments and final accounts less scary. When you praise the building blocks, not only the finished result, you encourage the patient work the subject needs.
Praise the process they can repeat
Good praise is specific. “Well done” is pleasant but vague. “I noticed you went back and checked your trial balance instead of assuming it was right” tells your child exactly what they did well.
Habits worth naming in accounting include working step by step, checking their own figures, redoing a question they got wrong, and asking for help when stuck.
Here is an example. Your child works a practice question where a business buys equipment for RM20,000 and depreciates it at 10 per cent a year on cost. The first time, they forget the depreciation charge and profit looks too high.
The second time, they remember the RM2,000 charge, reduce profit and show the equipment at RM18,000 on the statement of financial position. The marks on the two attempts may differ a lot. But the thing to praise is not the higher score.
It is that they spotted their own omission and fixed it. That self-correction keeps earning marks long after the question is forgotten.
Protect motivation after a poor result
Setbacks are where this approach pays off. After a disappointing result, a child praised only for grades hears failure and may decide they are no good at accounting.
A child used to having effort valued can ask what to do differently next time. Your response in that moment, curious and not disappointed, teaches your child how to treat their own setbacks.
After a weak result, separate the mark from the diagnosis. Ask gently which parts felt solid and which felt shaky. A child who scored poorly overall may be strong on ledger entries but lost easy marks on adjustments or layout.
That is not failure. It is a to-do list. Naming the weak area turns “I’m bad at this” into something fixable.
Be careful with big rewards
Big rewards tied to grades can backfire. They shift attention to the prize, raise the stakes of every test, and can make a child avoid harder topics for fear of losing the reward.
If your child only tries easy topics to keep results high, the reward is working against them. Rewarding effort avoids this, because trying itself earns your approval.
Dropping grade-linked prizes does not mean no rewards. The reward changes shape, from a payout tied to a number to warm, real attention tied to a behaviour.
Notice the small, quiet work
Much accounting progress is quiet: a concept that finally clicks, a careless error that stops recurring, a topic that no longer brings dread. Notice these. Try a comment like:
“You seem much more comfortable with adjustments than you were a month ago.”
It can mean more than praise for a test score, because it shows you see the real work.
Let your child own their progress
Effort-based encouragement works best when your child values their own progress, not just your approval. Ask what they found hard and what they cracked, and let them describe their wins. The aim is an inner sense of “I worked at this and got better”, which keeps motivation going after any outside reward fades.
One way to build this is a simple record your child controls. It could be a short list of questions they got wrong and later got right, or topics that moved from “dreaded” to “manageable”.
When motivation dips, they can look at it and say, “I have done hard things before.” Our guide on judging progress without exam results has more on this.
Practical ways to reward effort
Also protect the conditions for effort. Give your child a predictable, unhurried study slot, free of the idea that only a top grade will do.
That makes it easier to try the harder questions, where the most learning happens. Effort grows when a child feels safe to struggle for a while before getting it right.
Keep the balance
If your child works hard but the marks do not yet show it, one of our experienced accounting teachers can show them which habits make the difference. They then practise those steps together, one-to-one. Book a trial class.