Study Skills and Cognitive Skills

We have many families contact us to help their child improve their study skills.  Study and homework issues like procrastination, poor test taking, poor organizational skills and difficulties with prioritizing and time management are common.  

Tutoring strategies can help as students bring their homework and work through it with the help of a tutor.  This can help a child keep up and get their work completed, but it is not usually identifying and addressing why the child needs this type of study skills or tutoring help in the first place.

When a student struggles with study skills, we find that often a combination of weak cognitive skills can be driving the difficulty.  If these issues exist and are not addressed, students can continue needing tutoring help year-after-year to keep up given the root cause is never addressed.  We sometimes see that when a child goes off to college with these difficulties, they are overwhelmed having to manage themselves and their class load on their own. 

To identify the root cause, an ideal first step is to contact the LearningRx Savage location to schedule an initial assessment.  This assessment will identify your child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses and provide insights as to why they struggle with study skills.  Whether you move forward with us or not, finding out the root cause is an important step.  For example, the assessment would let us know if your child’s difficulties are completely due to a lack of motivation or something deeper.  

As far as cognitive skills and study skills, some examples as to how they are linked would be:

• Long-term memory issues:  If this skill is low, a child can study all week for a test and then struggle on test day.  This can lead a parent or teacher to believe they are not studying effectively, when the study methods are fine, but they can’t retain the information they studied.
• Processing speed issues:  Processing weaknesses have significant impacts on attention skills, motivation and time management.  Student with low processing speed often struggle to start or complete tasks.  

These are just a few examples but the main point is that, if the root cause is not addressed, your child can do a lot of tutoring or coaching, but they will likely continue to struggle and need these aids.  LearningRx training will identify and address the root cause enabling your child to excel and, ideally, not need extra help via tutoring going forward.