Help Students Differentiate Thinking Skills with Metacognitive Tools

Students will begin the 2022–2023 academic year in our post-quarantine world with optimism and excitement to join their peers on campus. But many students will soon struggle as the reality of college work sets in. Their academic success depends on their ability to activate one specific metacognitive skill: students must know how to differentiate their thinking skills. Here’s a comparison …

Help Students Succeed: The Three Cs of Academic Work

Far too many students needlessly struggle their way through college. They study to the best of their abilities, but their grades simply don’t improve. Why does this happen? Students who can’t find their groove in college have never learned the basics about academic work. Here’s a quick crash course to help students succeed using the foundational components of academic work. …

Why Our Academic Solutions Fail – Part IV: Addressing Nora’s Skill Deficit Problem

Nora was required to meet with me as a condition of her academic probation status. She’d missed several days of class and had a .8 GPA at the end of her first semester of college. Her serial absences gave her professors a seemingly clear signal that she was disinterested in college. However, after getting a more holistic perspective, I realized that Nora’s inability …

WHY OUR ACADEMIC SOLUTIONS FAIL – PART III: Correcting Marcus’s Faulty Conceptions

In my experience, the learning problems of college students have conceptual roots dating back to their elementary school days. By the time students reach adulthood, they’ve been doing school “stuff” for many years: taking tests, reading books, writing papers, solving math problems and attending class. Students have invested more than 20,000 hours in school activities before stepping foot on a college …

Why Our Academic Solutions Fail – Part II: Dispelling Ayanna’s Faulty Disposition

As a high school student, Ayanna had excelled in an advanced placement program at a reputable private academy. She said high school had come easy to her. College hadn’t started out so trouble-free, however. Ayanna’s chemistry course had become her most pressing concern; she’d “bombed” her first two tests, which was particularly unsettling because this was the area in which …