The Learning Process: Why Children Struggle and What To Do

By MaryPat Correro, Ed.M.

The beginning months of school are usually a time of fun, meeting new friends, adjusting to new routines while brushing up on last year’s skills.

However, by now, the challenges of learning this year’s concepts and skills may be apparent. They may be subtle and not evident to their teacher at first, but you as a parent notice that “something is not right”.

The problem is most often not due to the teaching or the content being presented but rather to underdeveloped intellectual and cognitive processing skills, weak sensory motor integration and inefficiency (not acuity) of the visual and auditory systems. All of these skill areas can and need to be improved and resolved for children to experience real success in school and achieve their potential.

Since tutoring addresses the same content as school, it will not resolve covert cognitive processing difficulties which are the true cause of Symptoms As:

Difficulty learning to Read, Comprehend, Retain information, Follow directions, Focus attention, Calculate math problems, Write, Spell and complete school work in a reasonable amount of time without parent intervention.

Often tutoring becomes a cycle year after year, a crutch that will get children “through school” but not resolve the root cause of the problem at hand nor create independent learning.

When is tutoring recommended and most beneficial?

*When a child has had a poor instructional/educational experience

* When they have missed excessive amounts of school due to a long illness or other reasons

* If a student has always done well in school and is going into a more academically challenging program and wants to brush up on his or her skills.

* Preparation for standardized exams as SAT

The majority of children going to tutoring, however, do not fall into these categories, and are not struggling because of poor educational systems or lack of instruction but because of weak cognitive processing abilities, which are often covert creating a “silent struggler” scenario.

Most struggling students:

Have consistent school attendance

Attend good schools with well qualified teachers and sound curriculum

Do their homework, study, and receive consistent support from their parents to do everything required to “do well” in school!

AND YET THEY STILL STRUGGLE TO LEARN!

Too OFTEN They are also mislabeled as “not being motivated”, ”not trying hard enough” “having ADD” You NAME it!

ACTUALLY THESE LABELS are Most Often SYMPTOMS OF

COVERT LEARNING PROBLEMS

Tutoring under these circumstances does a disservice, becoming an ongoing cycle that does not address the true problems at hand! Also, these students spend too much time being “spoonfed” through school programs that do not get to the crux of the problem either!

Sound like a child YOU know?

As Founder and Director of The Center For Learning Enhancement, I diagnose, identify and remediate the root causes of learning difficulties through Learning Therapy, a therapeutic training approach based on over 65 years of psycho-educational research. Intellectual abilities crucial to successful school performance, and methods of evaluating and training these abilities have been developed and proven effective with thousands of children from pre-k through high school in hundreds of public schools and private learning centers throughout the US A and internationally.

Different from the traditional assessments done through schools, evaluations done at the Center For Learning Enhancement, are Comprehensive and Diagnostic identifying the Intellectual, Perceptual, Sensory Motor Integration and Visual Focusing Skills interfering with your child’s performance and providing an individualized treatment plan to resolve them. As a result, students can function well in class, succeed academically and most importantly, become life long, independent learners.