Ensuring your high schooler is ready for college For parents with a high schooler, the prospect of preparing your student for college can feel overwhelming. There are SATs, college applications, college tours, and life skills for independence. After all, just knowing your teen is smart doesn’t mean they’re ready for college. Sure, you won’t be able to control what time they go to bed, distractions from party invitations, and whether or not they start that term paper the night before it’s due. But you can help prepare them for college by ensuring their cognitive skills are strong. No, we’re not talking about tutoring: That’s an entirely different solution to an entirely different problem. We’re talking about sending them off to college with maximized brain skills to help ensure they can reach their full potential for learning. To help you better understand the importance of having strong cognitive skills—including auditory and visual processing, memory, logic & reasoning, attention, and processing speed, you first have to understand that there are two parts to smart. Knowledge vs. Strong Cognitive Skills for College The first part, knowledge, is information gained from learning, studying, and memorizing material. This includes things like mathematical equations, historical facts, and grammar. Tutoring can be helpful to catch students up on this type of material if they miss instruction the first time. This could be due to a lengthy illness or a family move mid-year. By reteaching information that was missed the first time, students can get up to speed with their peers. The second part of intelligence is how a person grasps, processes, stores, applies, and remembers new information. This is where strong brain skills are vital! Ensuring these foundational tools are working at their best allows students to learn, read, think, and remember quickly and easily—no matter the subject! Unfortunately, many people believe that kids who have memorized lots of academic information—such as facts, figures, and formulas—will automatically do well in college. But just because they scored well on standardized tests and final exams doesn’t mean their success will translate to college. The truth is, learning isn’t about how much you know but rather how effectively you process the information you receive. By strengthening your student’s cognitive skills now, you’ll create a stronger learner for college. And a strong learner is what’s needed to succeed in college, at work, and in life in general. Some parents mistakenly assume that if their teen is getting A’s and B’s in high school, that’s probably what they’ll get in college. The reality is that college is much more difficult than high school, and memorizing material just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Teens need their cognitive skills—like processing speed, prioritizing logic & reasoning, and problem-solving skills—to be maximized not only to keep up in college but to truly excel. How personal brain training prepares students for college Tutoring focuses on reteaching information that was missed the first time. College prep courses focus on study habits and academic material. But personal brain training targets and works on brain skills that aren’t maximized for full learning potential. At LearningRx, every initial consultation starts with a discussion about your student’s learning abilities (or struggles). We’ll also give you a demonstration of how our personal brain training programs work. Finally, we’ll use a Brain Skills Assessment to determine which cognitive skills are strong and which could use a boost. We’ll review the results of the Brain Skills Assessment with you and answer any questions. If you choose to proceed with a LearningRx program, our team will build a custom brain training plan that targets the cognitive skills with the most room for growth. This plan is designed to serve as a roadmap to stronger learning and thinking skills. Your student’s personal brain trainer will work to target and strengthen any cognitive skills that need a boost. With our one-on-one approach, every learner gets the attention, feedback, and encouragement they need during training. Every session incorporates brain games, cognitive drills, and mental exercises to target specific skills. Our Personal Brain Training Results We understand that you don’t want to invest your time and money into a program unless it can back up its claims with results. We’re proud to say that we have the research to show that our graduates have experienced significant improvements in cognitive performance. Many of the kids and teens who have gone through LearningRx brain training have improved their cognitive performance by several years compared to peers. Some did it within a matter of months, not years! How do we know? After a student completes a personal brain training program, we perform a second Brain Skills Assessment to measure the impact of brain training on cognitive performance. Over a nine-year period, we collected results from more than 21,500 clients. The results from these Brain Skills Assessments showed that: • Our typical graduate saw across-the-board improvements! These included gains in attention, working memory, long-term memory, and processing speed. • Children and teens who graduated from LearningRx improved their learning and thinking skills by +3.7 years on average compared to their peers. • Adult LearningRx clients improved IQ scores by +14 points on average after completing a brain training program. Additionally, our research found gains in reading and math skills for students who had struggled in these areas. We also found improved learning and thinking skills for individuals with learning differences like ADHD and dyslexia. Getting Started There are two steps you can take to start your journey toward stronger cognitive skills for college. First, take our free online brain quiz to get early answers about how your mind (or your student’s mind) works. Next, contact your nearest LearningRx center to schedule an initial Brain Skills Assessment. The results will offer answers about why you (or your child) perform so well on certain activities yet struggles with other types of tasks or assignments. You have nothing to lose and a better brain (for college and beyond) to gain!