Assessing and helping challenging students: Part One, Why do some students have difficulty learning?

When students struggle with routine assignments and fall behind classmates, a busy teacher may pigeonhole them as slow, give up on them, or become frustrated from failed efforts to bring them up to speed. Well-intentioned efforts to help struggling students by providing repetitions of the same experiences may fail because the specific cause of the sub-par performance was not identified. Six potential causes of inadequate student performance can serve as a diagnostic framework to help teachers pinpoint why a student is struggling academically: 1) cognitive factors, including poorly integrated, compartmentalized information, poor metacognition that hinders the student's ability to monitor and self-correct performance, bona fide learning disabilities that require professional assessment and treatment, and sensory-perceptual difficulties that may hinder performance in certain health care disciplines; 2) ineffective study habits, which are more common among professional students than faculty realize; 3) an inadequate educational experience (unclear objectives, poorly organized instruction, absence of coaching and timely feedback) or a punitive environment in which students avoid approaching instructors for assistance; 4) distraction due to nonacademic issues such as social relationships, health of a spouse, or employment; 5) dysfunctional levels of defensiveness that hinder student-teacher communication; and 6) underlying medical conditions that may affect student attentiveness, motivation, energy, and emotional balance. The objective of this article is to help faculty recognize potential underlying causes of a student's learning problems. Strategies for helping the academically struggling student are also introduced for several of these etiologies.