I did actually convince my own thick skulled, 2eish, boy to show his work, as needed, but spending time with him on ALEKS.com math age 9, just for a few weeks. He very quickly figured out that if he showed and checked his work, and got three answers correct in a row, that he got new questions to answer. It was afterschool, and he was finally moving into his readiness level.
I'm saying that if you want a child to show their work, give them work that is hard enough that they need to show their work to get the right answer.
I believe that showing work is actually quite important but for 2e kids it can have a very high emotional cost, so try to look at it from their perspective.
I think it's Susan Weinbrenner who suggested classrooms offer a "5 hardest" alternative to that pageful of Math problems. It goes something like this: When the children get that pageful of problems, 5 have astericks. If the child can do those 5, correctly, then they get credit for the whole thing. Seems like if you want to demand that they show their work on those 5, or offer to allow them one mistake IF they did show their work on all 5, and you can see that it was a little mistake, but not involved with the concepts you are currently working on.
Does that help?
Grinity
