Going to college is no trivial matter, but succeeding in college is an entirely different challenge. Why does college make some students but break others? This article shares an effective strategy you can use to transform students’ struggles into successes. When students begin college, they automatically try to use the skills that got them into college to get them through …
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 …
Why Our Academic Solutions Fail: How to Help Students at the Source of Their Problems
The education community consists of the some of the most highly trained people in the world. So why are we educators so inept at improving student academic performance? I believe the difficulty stems from an inability to distinguish between symptoms and causes. Educators need to hone in on the origins of learners’ academic woes. To do so requires that instructors …
Transforming Your Tutoring Program: How to Move Beyond Important to Being Impactful
This webinar will be held on Tuesday, July 28 & Wednesday, July 29 at 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST. As educators, we must update our perspective from counting the number of students using our services, to measuring the impact we are having on students. The Transforming Good Students into Great Learners Webinar provides specific steps and resources that enable …
How Learning Centers Can Thrive in the Experience Economy
First, An Example of The Experience Economy If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how valuable is an experience? As the nation is locked in a heated debate about the cost of higher education, educators must realize that the real issue at hand is value. While cost may be the most widely used construct to discuss education’s rising …